Node.js Now Runs COBOL and FORTRAN (arstechnica.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday May 21, 2016 @11:30PM from the party-like-it's-1959 dept.

Last summer a developer created a plugin which made it possible to run snippets of COBOL code embedded in JavaScript using the Node.js interpreter. Now Slashdot reader techfilz writes: Romanian developer Bizau Ionica has engineered a software bridge called node.cobol which can execute Node.js scripts from within COBOL programs.
The link shows COBOL code executing a Node.js script that launches a Web server and creates ASCII art from a JPEG image -- in this case, Admiral Grace Hopper, who helped create COBOL in 1959. And Ars Technica points out the same developer has also built a Node.js bridge for FORTRAN.

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Re:They were so eager to see if they could... by ooloorie · 2016-05-22 01:29 · Score: 5, Informative

The other languages were compiled, completely procedural, and at least Fortran didn’t even support recursion until the 90’s.
I'm not sure what you mean by "were". Fortran is widely used in scientific computing. It has supported recursion since the 1970's, although it only was standardized in 1990. Fortran 200x is object oriented, supports operator overloading, and has excellent support for array and parallel computing.