Yep, and Julia too. Nothing is built from scratch… it is built on the decay of previous efforts. In a sense, all compiler languages are derivatives of Fortran
I can still kinda remember Pascal,
I rather like Pascal. I learnt it before C, and it was a good introduction. Pascal is probably THE best teaching language - and the Jensen and Wirth book is one of the classics of structured programming.
I can understand how you can survive in the Systems world with just scripts and no programming. There is a separation of skills, at least in business computing. In scientific computing it is different … programmers tend to rule the roost, because every project is new and different.
what about COBOL
It came just after Fortran, and like Fortran it filled a big hole at the time, getting people off assembler.
If you really want to appreciate compilers, write something to add up a row if numbers in assembler, then rewrite it in Fortran.
The difference between assembler and Fortran is orders of magnitude greater than the difference between Fortran and any later language. That was the biggest advance ever.
Cheers
Neville