Bangalore: Fifty six years back, this same day, witnessed the birth of the first most widely used programming language- Fortran, a language which changed programming more about output than the way of writing, for the first time.

Even though we no longer hear about this language often, it once paved the foundation to other new languages, shifting itself to one of the “historic programming languages.” The idea of this language was budded in IBM in early 1950’s when two scientists, Grace Murray Hopper and John Backus thought of developing a language which could talk to computers and relay information back to humans on a common ground closer to human language.

The outcome was Fortran compiler, which could translate high level formulae into a language computer could understand. It was then shared with the programming community and in 1957, IBM released a Fortran compiler for its IBM 704, the first mass produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware.

A second version of the language was introduced within a couple of years which had revolutionary subroutines. It made coding simple with enabling the reusable pieces of software possible. From then, Fortran came to dominate the area of programming and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics and computational chemistry.

The language is one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

According to Ken Thompson, who developed the Unix, “95 % of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.”

The language, with its mathematical capabilities is still alluring the scientific communities and is widely used by engineers.