Also known as: Fortran
FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), introduced by IBM in 1957, was the first widely used high-level language.1 Built so scientists could write formulas almost as they appear on paper, its descendants still dominate high-performance numerical computing.2
History
Before FORTRAN, fast code meant hand-written assembly, and many doubted a compiler could match a human’s tuned machine code. John Backus’s team at IBM proved otherwise, and the productivity gain was so large there was no going back. FORTRAN focused on fast numerical computation — exactly the number-crunching behind filtering and demodulating signals — and it established that high-level languages were practical, opening the door to every language that followed.
Legacy and use today
FORTRAN is statically typed, compiled to native code, and imperative and array-oriented in style, with no garbage collector.1 Decades of mature, heavily optimised numerical libraries are written in it, and it remains in active use across weather modelling, physics, and high-performance computing where raw numeric throughput matters. Its drawbacks are those of its age: the language and much existing code feel dated next to modern tooling, and it is a numeric specialist rather than a general-purpose language. Newer numeric languages like Julia court its users, while C became the more general systems-and-DSP workhorse. It shares the early-language stage with COBOL and LISP.
Sources
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Fortran — Wikipedia, for history, the 1957 origin, and the compiled, statically typed design. ↩ ↩2
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Fortran programming language — official community site, documentation, and the modern Fortran ecosystem. ↩