Indeed, reentrance and recursivity and the use of stacks and/or heaps for dynamic memory allocation have appeared in programming languages that have descendants still used today only in 1960, in ALGOL 60 and LISP I. These features have become ubiquitous in the later programming languages, all of which have been at least partially inspired by ALGOL or LISP.

Fortran is the only surviving programming language older than that (first specification in 1954 and first implementation in 1956). Cobol is the only surviving programming language equally old with LISP and ALGOL, so that it has not been influenced by either of them. Thus now Fortran and Cobol are the only surviving programming languages from the era when only static memory allocation was used in programs, though their later versions have added most modern programming language features.

I hate to be superficial, but languages without braces just feel weird to me. I can use them and have even for a paycheck, but... no thanks. Even Lua, one of my favorite languages (if not #1), always feels at least slightly weird when I use it because of do/end.

It's always the people that are chronically online here that comment with most lowbrow stuff. Yes Fortran is so dead that NVIDIA and Intel are both building new compilers for it

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/r...

https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-fortran

https://flang.llvm.org/docs/

That narrow minded approach is one of the reasons OpenCL lost to CUDA, by not taking Fortran support seriously.

I was on a OpenCL Webminar panel, where Khronos folks said exactly the same thing.

Meanwhile, NVidia's investment into PGI compilers really paid itself out.