FORTRAN, or FORmula TRANslation, was a milestone in computing history. It was developed in 1957 by a team from IBM. At the time, computers had very small memories, were slow, and had very primitive operating systems. The only practical way to program was in assembly language, which is as close to programming in binary code as you can get. It was the first high level language to be a success. It allowed programs that previously took weeks to write to be written in hours.

Visual Basic was Microsoft's attempt in the programming language arena. Version 1.0 was released in 1991, and was meant to compete with C, C++, and Pascal. It didn't, at least until version 2.0 was released in 1993. People began to discover the power of Visual Basic and by version 3.0 became one of the fastest growing languages. Visual Basic almost freed BASIC (BASIC was one of the first languages that...