In the 60 years since the creation of the first Fortran compiler, there has been tremendous activity in the field of programming languages and computer science. (OK, these computers only had a fraction of the power of today's smartphones.) Advertisement The computers themselves, about as powerful as today’s smartphones, were giant installations that required entire buildings. Your output came to you on a heavy pile of paper. If you made a typo, you had to punch a new card and give the stack to the computer operator again.

Why, in a temple of modernity employing research instruments at the bleeding edge of technology, does a language from the very earliest days of the electronic computer continue to dominate? When Fortran was created, our ancestors were required to enter their programs by punching holes in cardboard rectangles: one statement per card, with a tall stack of these constituting the code. These projects are just a few random examples from a large computational universe, but all use some version of Fortran as the main language.

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. 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. But almost universally, the language in which these simulation codes are written is Fortran, a relic from the 1950s. 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. Some of the people hunched over these screens are writing papers, some are analyzing data, and some are working on simulations. There are computers and terminals everywhere. 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.Ī large research project in the physical sciences usually involves experimenters, theorists, and people carrying out calculations with computers. “I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.” -Tony Hoare, winner of the 1980 Turing Award, in 1982.

Fortran codes