Comment by antonvs
4 days ago
> One thing it did well was expressing formulas
Its name stands for “Formula Translation,” after all.
> I guess this was revolutionary at the time.
Yes. There was some prior art, but Fortran was the first “mainstream” (for the time) language to offer anything like this.
I read somewhere that it was one of the first high level languages. There probably were a few others, which are less well known.
I had Fortran in college as one course. But we didn't have access to any computers to run our programs, because this was in India a few decades ago, in the just post-mainframe age, so we had to write all our programs on paper and submit them to the teacher for evaluation and scoring, ha ha.
It's more accurate to say that Fortran was one of the first that became widely used, along with Cobol, Algol, and Lisp. It didn't come out of nowhere, there were dozens of other languages at the time, if not hundreds depending on how you count - e.g. Plankalkül was designed at least 10 years before Fortran, but never implemented.
For example, here's one that's described as "the first operating algebraic compiler": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laning_and_Zierler_system
I had a similar college experience, but there was a mainframe at our university. We submitted Fortran code either written on paper designed to be OCRd (write each letter in a separate box), or later on punch cards and got a printout back a few days later, sometimes as long as a week. It was a strong incentive to make sure there were no bugs.