It's 30 years since I last used Fortran to pass my Civil & Structural Bachelor's and Masters. Loved the simplicity of it, modelling spring stiffness in concrete and steel piles hammers into the ground and tie rods being pulled out of their grout anchors. However, what blows my mind is that something I did on a 386/ 486 as a 3-6 month research degree is now modelled by AI and run on my desktop in minutes.
FORTRAN is also the origin of using 'i', 'j', 'k', etc as loop variables in code, since 'i' was the first variable name that could be used for that purpose. The original language design was constrained by very primitive computers.
Is that really true, if so, what's your basis? Fourier used i for the same purpose, and it definitely became a pretty standard indexing variable long before the 1950s.
Most early code written in FORTRAN was essentially just transcribing formulae and algorithms that already would use such variable names.
The reason 'i' was the first letter available was because by default identifiers starting with, I think, I-N were integers instead of float.
When I first started, with BASIC, my variable of choice was T simply because it was easy to type NEXT T in the FOR loops (why not R? I dunno...T just stuck).
I started off programming in FORTRAN in my first job, 40 years ago. There was a lot of terrible stuff in FORTRAN from a software engineering point of view: COMMON blocks, GOTOs, ENTRY points (to enter a subroutine part way through!), but it was one of the first high level language and language designers had a lot to learn.
Happy birthday! I think this has to be the oldest programming language still in use. 70 years is quite an eternity in the sphere of computing. Before Fortran, there was (almost?) nothing but assembler and plug board connectors.
In the mid 90s I used Fortran to model a distillation column in a chemical engineering plant. Here I read that it is still the go to language for nuclear engineering. I am amazed but for some reason happy about this.
I don't see why. LISP is just a year younger and COBOL is 2 years younger. And Algol, spawned a year after FORTRAN, is no longer used as such (although there is now GCC support for Algol 68) but spawned many "Algol-like" languages, including most of the languages used today ... and even modern Fortran can be considered "Algol-like", having evolved to include its block structure.
FWIW, I started programming in 1965, in FORTRAN II.
I believe it has changed quite a lot, keeping its focus for scientific/engineering computing, but adapting more modern language constructs. I'm not sure how much of the archaic stuff (COMMON blocks, ENTRY points etc) is supported in the more recent standards for backward compatibility.
When I first started, with BASIC, my variable of choice was T simply because it was easy to type NEXT T in the FOR loops (why not R? I dunno...T just stuck).
Many years of FORTRAN. Followed by many years of Fortran.
It beats LISP by a year and COBOL by two years.
FWIW, I started programming in 1965, in FORTRAN II.