ubikuberalles' Blog - Sad day for old school computer geeks

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Today I learned that John Backus, the "father" of the programming language FORTRAN, has died. Here's the article on his death.

 

I first learned FORTRAN back in 1978 when I went to engineering school. FORTRAN was the standard programming language for engineers at the time and students were required to learn it (many of the math and engineering classes required students to write problem solutions in FORTRAN). After I graduated, I wrote several major FORTRAN programs that generated 3D plots of engineering data. As you can see, FORTRAN played an important part in my early career and so I was saddened to hear of the death of its creator.

 

Only after reading the article about Backus's death did I fully understand the impact of FORTRAN on the computer world. It was the very first high-level programming language (I always thought that COBOL held that title) and it changed the way people programmed computers. Before FORTRAN people would program the computers either with machine language (flipping the switches on the front panel) or by using assembly language. Very tedious work and developement times for programs were very long. FORTRAN changed all that and reduced the development time significantly.

 

Is FORTRAN still in use today? I would suppose so since efforts are under way to introduce FORTRAN 2008, a new version of the language and a revision of FORTRAN 2003. FORTRAN was the standard programming language for the Cray supercomputers back in the day. That was mainly because the language made it easy to perform parallel processing - something the later Cray supercomputers were designed for. FORTRAN is very good at number crunching and it would not surprise me if it is used today by modern supercomputers. However, I have no idea if that is true since I haven't been keeping up to date on FORTRAN news (I didn't even know there was a FORTRAN 2003 standard - I stopped paying attention before the FORTRAN 90 standard was completed in 1992).

 

I haven't written a new FORTRAN program in at least 15 years and I don't even have FORTRAN installed on any of my PCs (Although I recently downloaded a FORTRAN compilier). However, I do have it installed on one of my old VAXen (VAXen - and not VAXes - is the proper plural of VAX). I think, in honor of John Backus, I should power up one of my VAXen and write a FORTRAN program (of course, considering how rusty my FORTRAN skills are, I probably won't be able to write anything more sophisticated than "HELLO WORLD").

 

So long, Mr. Backus, thanks for your pioneering efforts.

 

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