It seems appropriate to leave my initial “Hello World” post here. The phrase It reminds me of my freshman year of undergraduate when I had to pick a coding class to take. We were given two options: MatLab or Fortran. Not knowing any better I signed up for Fortran because it fit better in my schedule. After I completed the course I eventually realized that Fortran is the modern equivalent of Latin. It was used extensively a long time ago (apparently the first language my dad learned was Fortran) and is still in some isolated pockets today (I was also once told that the Space Shuttle re-entry code was still written in Fortran), but has generally been relegated to history books. Matlab, on the other hand, I finally taught myself in grad school and still use it regularly today.

Regardless, taking Fortran still taught me the basics of computer coding, and is still only my second or third biggest regret from my undergraduate course selection. The first? Not taking Wine Tasting or Floral Arrangement as humanities electives. Those would have been significantly more useful today than whatever I picked up in my geography course.