Comment by theodorethomas

There is one under-appreciated aspect of Fortran.

Here is something that started as a specification of the input format of one particular program-tool. That input format was then cloned and mutated by dozens of me-too program-tools. Eventually that format was able to support an interpretation as a language with its own language-like abstractions. That is astonishing and I think was not on the radar of computing machinery people in the 50s.