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Return to Fortran, Fortran bibliography, COBOL history, Computer history, Programming history, C++ history, C history, IBM RPG history

“Fortran is a compiled, statically typed, general-purpose programming language. It was developed by John Backus and his team at IBM, with the first release in 1957 for the IBM 704 computer. Originally called FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), it allowed programmers to write programs more easily compared to writing machine instructions of the era. Fortran was one of the first high-level programming languages in history and is the oldest language still in active use and development today. In that sense, Fortran was the very beginning of the modern computing that we practice today.” (MdFtrn 2020)

“The language has since evolved through more than a dozen revisions and several ISO standards. Fortran remains the dominant language of high-performance computing (HPC), where many interconnected processors work together to solve huge problems. Fortran 2018 is the most recent iteration of the language. The next revision, with the current working name Fortran 202x, is in development and expected to come out in the next few years.” (MdFtrn)

“Today, Fortran is the leading programming language used in many areas of physical science and engineering. These include computational fluid dynamics, numerical weather prediction, climate science, aerodynamics, astrophysics and so on. Fortran is also used to benchmark the world’s fastest and largest supercomputers (https://top500.org). Many universities still teach Fortran programming in science and engineering tracks because Fortran remains relevant in those industries. With the explosion of internet and mobile technologies over the past 20 years, it’s evident that the Fortran ecosystem has fallen into the shadows, at least from the point of view of mainstream computing. However, its relevance never lessened on an absolute scale. In fact, Fortran compilers, Fortran libraries, and its open source community are stronger than ever. Fortran is the only standardized language with a native parallel programming model, expressed using an intuitive array-like syntax. With the current trend toward many-core architectures, it’s safe to say that Fortran will be relevant for many years to come.” (MdFtrn)

1. Introduction ##

Fortran has a long history. Many other programming languages have come and gone over the life of Fortran. Part of this success is that Fortran has avoided the temptation of implementing new programming concepts. Unfortunately, the resistance to change has also been responsible for Fortran's diminishing user base over the last 20 years. Fortran 2003 and 2008 fix the most glaring deficiencies, such as standardized C interoperability and better string support. But is it too late to prevent Fortran's demise?

1. Links ##

• [The Seven Ages of Fortran](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/15766882.pdf) - A review by Michael Metcalf written in 2011.
• [A brief Fortran History](http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-1.html) - general Fortran history
• [The Fortran Saga](http://www.fortranplus.co.uk/resources/brian_meeks_fortran_saga.pdf) - PDF of Brian Meek's well-known document on the politics of Fortran Standards development.
• [Fortran90 history](http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/tcg/consweb/Fortran90/scnhist.html) - Discusses the history of the Fortran90 revision.
• [FORTRAN: The Pioneering Programming Language](http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/icons/fortran/) - an IBM article on the history of Fortran.
• Early Fortran documents at the [Computer History Museum](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/fortranarchive/)
• [FORTRAN: A Historical View](http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/fortint.htm) - by John J. G. Savard. Covers the original FORTRAN through Fortran 2003.

Fair Use Source: (FtrnWiki) https://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/Fortran+History

Snippet from Wikipedia: Fortran

Fortran (; formerly FORTRAN) is a third generation, compiled, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.

Fortran was originally developed by IBM. It first compiled correctly in 1958. Fortran computer programs have been written to support scientific and engineering applications, such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, plasma physics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry. It is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

Fortran has evolved through numerous versions and dialects. In 1966, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard for Fortran to limit proliferation of compilers using slightly different syntax. Successive versions have added support for a character data type (Fortran 77), structured programming, array programming, modular programming, generic programming (Fortran 90), parallel computing (Fortran 95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003), and concurrent programming (Fortran 2008).

Since April 2024, Fortran has ranked among the top ten languages in the TIOBE index, a measure of the popularity of programming languages.

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Fair Use Sources:

• FtrnWiki https://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/Fortran+History
• B097819373 (MdFtrn 2021)