The programming language that would not die.
I learned it back in 1972 at Boston University on their IBM System 360. I would hand in a deck of punch-cards and the operator would wish me good luck and tell me to come back the next morning. Interactive timesharing was developed ten years earlier but I didn't get to use it for another three years.
The same year as the Altair article in Popular-Electronics.
From Ars Technica:
Scientific computing’s future: Can any coding language top a 1950s behemoth?
Take a tour through the research laboratories at any university physics department or national lab, and much of what you will see defines “cutting edge.” “Research,” after all, means seeing what has never been seen before—looking deeper, measuring more precisely, thinking about problems in new ways.
A large research project in the physical sciences usually involves experimenters, theorists, and people carrying out calculations with computers. There are computers and terminals everywhere. Some of the people hunched over these screens are writing papers, some are analyzing data, and some are working on simulations. These simulations are also quite often on the cutting edge, pushing the world’s fastest supercomputers, with their thousands of networked processors, to the limit. But almost universally, the language in which these simulation codes are written is Fortran, a relic from the 1950s.
Wherever you see giant simulations of the type that run for days on the world’s most massive supercomputers, you are likely to see Fortran code. Some examples are atmospheric modeling and weather prediction carried out by the National Center for Atmospheric Research; classified nuclear weapons and laser fusion codes at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Labs; NASA models of global climate change; and an international consortium of Quantum Chromodynamics researchers, calculating the behavior of quarks, the constituents of protons and neutrons. These projects are just a few random examples from a large computational universe, but all use some version of Fortran as the main language.
It handles large numbers really well and there is a huge set of well-known libraries available. Definitely the lingua franca of scientific grunt-work and a real speed-daemon when properly optimized. Most computer (and chipset - Intel) manufacturers release their own versions optimized for their hardware. The article also goes into some of Fortran's contemporaries as well as potential successors.
Forget who it was but I remember someone saying that their definition of Hell would be having to write a word-processor in Fortran. Each language has its strengths and weaknesses.
Also, Fortran stands for FORmula TRANslator...
