{"id":189,"date":"2019-08-06T10:48:29","date_gmt":"2019-08-06T10:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.techtodayinfo.com\/?p=189"},"modified":"2019-08-07T12:45:12","modified_gmt":"2019-08-07T12:45:12","slug":"fortran-the-first-step-to-modern-programming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.techtodayinfo.com\/fortran-the-first-step-to-modern-programming\/","title":{"rendered":"Fortran, the first step to modern programming"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the Museum of Computer History<\/strong> ,\nwhich since 1996 has its headquarters in Mountain View, California, they have a\ncomplete website that allows us to visit it virtually and review the history of\nits facilities. From its content I highlight a phrase: \u201csoftware is more\nthan a cryptic computer code. It’s an art form: a meticulously crafted\nliterature that allows complex conversations between humans and machines. \u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Communicating with our\ncomputer or with our smartphone is nowadays as easy as pressing some icons,\nopening menus, choosing an option from a list of actions … We can communicate with any device<\/strong>using\nmice, keyboards, touch screens or even with the voice. But at the dawn of\ncomputing, talking to a computer was to introduce a punch card that represented\norders in binary code. It was the only way to make us understand with the\nfirst computers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, programming is the way\nto communicate with an electronic device or, beyond, create the necessary tools\nfor anyone to interact with that device. And as the Computer History\nMuseum itself emphasizes, it was with Fortran<\/strong> that\nmodern programming began as we know it now. We must not detract from the\nrole of Assembler<\/strong> ,\nthe first language through code that opened the doors to the generic languages\n\u200b\u200bthat would come later, but it was with Fortran that the trail of languages\n\u200b\u200bthat we have seen during these decades to the present began. This is his\nstory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A natural\nprogramming language<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the TIOBE index of the\nmost requested programming languages, Fortran is still there, specifically in\nthe 29th place of more than 100<\/strong> indexed languages<\/strong> . Obviously,\nthe kings are Java, C Python and other more modern languages, but that a\nlanguage as primitive as Fortran is still alive has merit in a world,\ncomputing, in which everything progresses and happens so fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortran was born in 1954.\nHis fatherhood is attributed to John\nBackus<\/strong> , an American computer scientist who worked for IBM\nand who proposed creating a programming language close to normal mathematical\nnotation. Acronym for FORmula\nTRANslation<\/strong> , the initial purpose of this language was to\neasily translate mathematical formulas into code that a computer of the time\nunderstood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a curiosity, the previous year, Backus had been working in another similar language called Speedcoding<\/strong> and developed for IBM 701 equipment. And among his previous work at IBM, he highlights his work on the SSEC (Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator) project<\/strong> writing a program that will calculate The positions of the moon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nfirst Fortran manual. Museum of Computer History. Source: Heiko\nPurnhagen (Flickr)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Returning to Fortran, its specifications\nwere ready in 1954, initially to run on IBM\n704 computers<\/strong> , but it was not until two years later that\nthe first Fortran manual<\/strong> was\npublished and finally made public in 1957 at the Western Joint Computer\nConference of the Angels. Curiously, there was an initial reluctance to\nadopt this new language instead of the\nassembly language<\/strong> (1949) to which they were all\naccustomed. However, Fortran made the task of programming more agile,\neliminating the number of lines of code needed, so it did not take long to\nbecome popular. Not to mention that it was the first high-level language<\/strong>,\nwhich allowed us to program human language more naturally. In addition, it\nintroduced the concept of compiler<\/strong> ,\nwhich allowed to translate entire programs for different machines, something\nthat was previously done by hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some time ago I spoke in an article entitled BASIC, the first language for all audiences , that the BASIC language democratized access to computing<\/strong> worldwide, something that was previously restricted to engineers, mathematicians and other technical professions. This at the level of microcomputers, the computers that began to emerge from the 70s. But before the so-called microcomputers, the computers of that time, larger, were also restricted to a small group of professionals. With Fortran, anyone could learn the necessary commands<\/strong> to create a program and give it to the computer to run. It wasn’t as easy as programming a microwave, but it was a great evolutionary leap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Standards<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The team led by John Backus\nand that made the Fortran language possible was mainly composed of engineers,\nprogrammers and mathematicians and, as a curiosity, a cryptographer and a chess\nexpert. In subsequent interviews, a team member, Richard Goldberg, came to\nsay: “we were the ‘hackers’ of those days.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the first time in the history of computing, it was the software that took all the prominence<\/strong> after several years in which the machinery and its constant evolution starred the headlines. Fortran changed the landscape and made with the same computer tasks could be performed more efficiently, since the necessary code was written in less time<\/strong> and did not require such specialized profiles. Fortran’s success was such that John Backus was awarded in 1975 with the United States National Medal of Science and in 1977 he was awarded the Turing Prize of the Association for Computing Machinery<\/em> .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The legacy of Fortran<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If we consult a genealogical tree<\/strong> of programming languages, in most of them Fortran appears as the first and from it all others appear. One of the most complete can be found on the IBM page dedicated to its 100 years and that offers a large amount of material on how computing has evolved throughout this time.Board game inspired by the Fortran language. Source: Computer History Musem <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is not that there is a\ndirect relationship between some languages \u200b\u200band others, but in these\ngenealogical trees languages \u200b\u200bare related based\non the similarity and influence<\/strong> that some have had on\nothers. For example, Fortran emerged from languages \u200b\u200bthat later had great\nprojection, such as Lisp (1958), COBOL (1959) or ALGOL (1958). In turn,\nfrom these emerged others and thus in an infinity of branches that reach our\ndays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said at the beginning of this article that Fortran is still alive and is among the first 30 programming languages. We can find abundant bibliography related to Fortran, both ancient and modern manuals. In the network, for example, there are very complete resources such as Fortran Wiki<\/strong><\/strong> , where it explains everything we need to know about Fortran, its different standards and other relevant information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Museum of Computer History , which since 1996 has its headquarters in Mountain View, California, they have a complete website<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[78,77],"yoast_head":"\nFortran, the first step to modern programming - Tech Today Info<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Fortran, the first step to modern programmingThe TIOBE index indexes more than 100 programming languages. All have an origin, the assembly language, which allowed us to stop using zeros and ones to program using easy-to-remember commands. But it was not until the arrival of Fortran that modern programming was born. 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