Why Is A 1957 Programming Language Still Running The World?

This morning's weather forecast was computed by a supercomputer running millions of lines of code, and a lot of that code is written in a language created in 1957 for an IBM 704 and punched cards. This is the story of Fortran. It begins with John Backus, a math student who was hired at IBM on the spot in 1950 and later said "much of my work has come from being lazy." His small team, which included a chess player, a cryptographer, a crystallographer and Vassar graduate Lois Haibt, built the first optimizing compiler, while almost everyone told them it couldn't be done. The first deck reached Westinghouse Bettis in an unmarked box in April 1957, and the first user program came back with an error message: a missing comma. Fortran went on to NASA and Dorothy Vaughan, WATFOR and WATFIV, the Cray-1, Dijkstra's "infantile disorder," Backus's own Turing Award lecture, and Dennis Ritchie's "Noalias must go." It also clears up the real story of the DO loop period and Mariner 1. Today it still runs weather and climate models, and in 2024 it climbed back into the TIOBE top ten. What was the first Fortran program you ever wrote, and what machine did it run on? Tell me in the comments. And if I got a date, a number or a name wrong, tell me there too. I read every comment and I pin corrections. Parts That Changed History tells the stories behind the chips, machines and parts that shaped the modern world, and the people who built them. Subscribe for a new story every day. SOURCES John Backus, "The History of FORTRAN I, II, and III," ACM History of Programming Languages, 1978/1981 Herbert S. Bright, "FORTRAN Comes to Westinghouse-Bettis, 1957," Computers and Automation, November 1971 IBM Heritage: "Fortran" and "John Backus" Steve Lohr, "John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies," The New York Times, March 20, 2007 John Backus, "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" Communications of the ACM, 1978 Edsger W. Dijkstra, EWD498, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" June 18, 1975 Dennis Ritchie, comments to X3J11 on noalias, March 20, 1988 Richard M. Russell, "The CRAY-1 Computer System," Communications of the ACM, January 1978 Ed Post, "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal," Datamation, July 1983 NASA: Dorothy J. Vaughan biography Eric Roberts / RISKS Digest 5.66 on Mariner 1; Fred Webb, alt.folklore.computers, 1990 University of Waterloo: WATFOR and WATFIV ECMWF: "How did the Integrated Forecasting System get its name?" (2018); IFS-Arpege coding standards McGibbon et al., "fv3gfs-wrapper," Geoscientific Model Development, 2021 TIOBE Index, May 2024 and May 2026; ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 (Fortran standards) Wikipedia: Fortran; John Backus; LINPACK; WATFIV #Fortran #ComputerHistory #Programming