20 September 17

I'm wearing a computer tie today to honor the 63rd anniversary of the first FORTRAN program. If you remember computer punch cards, you may also recall creating nested DO loops, calling subroutines, and declaring INTEGER variables. The word FORTRAN came from "formula translation" because the language was designed to process mathematical and statistical formulas. I learned to program with FORTRAN for the IBM 1130 at Houghton College, around 1972-73. Today I was surprised to learn that FORTRAN is still in use, although it has been superseded by other programming languages like C++, SQL and Python.