Fortran

"As I said in my comments to the committee, [Fortran 90' would be a] nice language, too bad it's not Fortran."

"FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes."

"In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included."

"FORTRAN—the "infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use."

"Recall the first American space probe to Venus, reportedly lost because Fortran cannot recognize a missing comma in a DO statement…"

"The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language."

"People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange surroundings — they can become accustomed to read Lisp and Fortran programs, for example."

"FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular."

"95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran."

"Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice."

"Warning: Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200."

""A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard." — a fortune cookie from the Unix program fortune."

"The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change."