# Anecdotal Fortran... :-) **URL:** \ **Category:** Uncategorized\ **Created:** [February 11, 2021, 5:58pm UTC](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/anecdotal-fortran/704 "2021-02-11T17:58:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 52
**Author:** ![Beliavsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ba8739/32.png) [@Beliavsky](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/u/Beliavsky)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2021, 11:18am UTC](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/anecdotal-fortran/704/52 "2021-03-21T11:18:40Z")
John Backus and the Business of Scientific Programming By David Alan Grier from an article [Why Fortran?](http://ftp.demec.ufpr.br/CFD/bibliografia/Decyk_et_al_2007_Fortran.pdf), _Computing in Science & Engineering_, July/August 2007 As a child, John Backus was unconcerned with either time or money. Born into a wealthy Delaware family, he was a restless youth with no clear focus or direction. Though he was able to gain admission to the University of Virginia, he did so badly in his studies that he was forced to leave the school in 1943 and spent the remainder of the war as a draftee in the army. He gained discipline only after he returned from the war and enrolled in a mathematics program at Columbia University. Mathematics led him to IBM. IBM introduced him to computer programming, and computer programming led him to think about the business of science. By 1950, when Backus joined IBM, programming was becoming a serious economic problem. “The expense of operating a computing installation,” he observed, “is almost equally divided between machine costs and personnel cost.”1 Programmers had few tools to assist them in their work, and most wrote their programs either in the basic codes that controlled the machine or with an assembly language that substituted simple names for those codes. IBM had one of the few more advanced programming tools, a system called Speedcode. Speedcode consisted of an elementary language and a special set of routines to handle scientific (floating-point) calculations, but it created bloated and inefficient programs. Backus defended the system by conceding the problems with the final code and then arguing that “Speedcoding reduces [overall] coding and testing time considerably,” and hence, “it will often be the more economical way of solving the problem.”1 In 1953, Backus proposed that the company create an alternative that could translate mathematical formulae into computer code, a project that quickly acquired the name Fortran. He felt the system would have to have a more expressive language than that of Speedcode and be more efficient. If the “object program [was] only half as fast as its hand coded counterpart, then acceptance of our system would be in serious danger,” he conceded.1 The problem of producing efficient code wasn’t easily solved. Backus’s Fortran compiler was a complicated system that divided the source program into its fundamental units, analyzed the connections between these units, and, from this analysis, tried to create code that would make good use of the machine. “We were often astonished at the surprising transformation in the indexing operations and in the arrangement of the computation which the compiler made,” Backus recalled. “We would not have thought to make [such changes] as programmers ourselves.” When Fortran was released in April 1957, it found quick acceptance among users of the IBM 704, the company’s big scientific processor. At every site, a few individuals claimed that they could write better code in assembly language, but the majority found Fortran to be simpler and adequately efficient. By 1960, other vendors had started to write their own Fortran compilers; by 1964, the American Standards Association had created a common definition of the language. Fifty years after its creation, Fortran is still employed for scientific computation and is one of the oldest computer artifacts still in use. When Backus reviewed his creation, he concluded that the language’s initial goals remained unfulfilled. The “plain fact is that few languages make programming sufficiently cheaper or more reliable,” he wrote in 1977. “There is a desperate need for a powerful methodology to help us think about programs and no conventional language even begins to meet that need.”2 These claims were a bit of an overstatement. Certainly, few people believed that the software of 1977 could have been produced with only the tools of machine code and assembly languages. Fewer still would accept such an opinion in 2007. Nonetheless, Backus’s statements point to a fundamental motivation for the development of computer languages: the desire to make computing less expensive. References 1. J. Backus, “[The IBM 701 Speedcoding System](https://cse.sc.edu/~mgv/csce330f12/speedcoding1954.pdf),” J. ACM, vol. 1, no. 1, 1953, pp. 4–6. 2. J. Backus, “[Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/359576.359579),” Comm. ACM, vol. 21, no. 8, 1978, pp. 613–641. Also interesting: [SOFTWARE; When Few Knew the Code, They Changed the Language](https://archive.is/w2ty0#selection-183.0-195.24) By STEVE LOHR New York Times Published: June 13, 2001 --- _[View the full topic](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/anecdotal-fortran/704)._