The father of Fortran programming language, John Backus (1924-2007) was born 90 years ago, on 3 December 1924. Fortran (Formula Translator or Formula Translation) exerted as much of an impact on computer science as did the micro processor. It was to become the first high-level programming language widely used by developers even today for creating applications mainly for engineering or scientific purposes. Fortran grew immensely popular because it is nothing more than the combination of English words and algebraic expressions. It is far easier to learn such a language than machine coding.

“Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs ,” said Backus about the birth of Fortran, which he started to develop with his team at IBM 60 years ago in 1954.

The first version of Fortran was published three years later in 1957. Backus and his colleagues intended Fortran to replace programming that required serious expertise and tedious work.

Various Fortran versions are distinguished by two digits placed after the word Fortran to indicate the year of release (for example 66, 77, 90, 95). New generation versions were released in 2003, 2008, and 2015.