I have found here three songs where Fortran appears:
https://www.lyrics.com/lyrics/FORTRAN
Science Truth for life
In fortran tongue the Answer
With wealth and prominence
Man so near perfection
Through the mullioned window
Saw you type away
Basic, Fortran, and in Cobol
In your snifter, soda laced with aspartame
With aspartame Russell
I expose my scrolls and code it in Fortran
I vote to upload a small part, perhaps the refrain to play on the main page of fortran-lang.org.
On another note check this guy’s version of “Write in C”, with a special mention to Fortran. The link https://youtu.be/1S1fISh-pag?t=50 starts directly to the Fortran part, but you can hear it from the beginning it’s quite funny.
(Song and poem parodies with computer related subjects)
http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/
But you will come to the day
When the only thing that counts
Are megaflops on a Cray
And you’ll have to deal with
FORTRAN
With FORTRAN, always bug free, don’t need no listin’ or DDT.
Machines are alive with the sound of FORTRAN,
With numbers they’ve crunched for a thousand hours;
They add and subtract to the sound of FORTRAN,
And raise fractions to unheard of powers.
I used to write a lot of FORTRAN,
For science it worked flawlessly.
Try using it for graphics!
Write in C.
You will find some other songs on this site by googling:
fortran site:www.poppyfields.net/filks/
August 5, 2020 | Written by: IBM Research Editorial Staff
Categorized: IBM Fellows
Frances “Fran” Allen, a pioneer in the world of computing, the first female IBM Fellow and the first woman to win the Turing Award, died on August 4, 2020, the day of her 88th birthday.
Fran grew up on a farm in Peru, New York. She graduated from The New York State College for Teachers (now SUNY – Albany) with a B.Sc. in mathematics in 1954 and began teaching school back at her local school in Peru. After two years, she enrolled at the University of Michigan and earned an M.Sc. degree in mathematics in 1957. In debt with student loans, Fran joined IBM Research in Poughkeepsie, NY as a programmer on July 15, 1957, where she taught incoming employees the basics of FORTRAN. She planned to stay only until her debts were paid, however, she ended up spending her entire career at IBM. Fran retired from IBM in 2002, but remained affiliated with the company as a Fellow Emerita.
As a pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, Fran made seminal contributions to the world of computing. Her work on inter-procedural analysis and automatic parallelization continues to be on the leading edge of compiler research. She successfully reduced this science to practice through the transfer of this technology to products such as the STRETCH HARVEST Compiler, the COBOL Compiler, and the Parallel FORTRAN Product.
As much as Fran will be remembered for her technical vision and her foundational work in computing, she will equally be remembered for her passion to inspire and mentor others, fostering an environment of perseverance and hard work throughout the IBM community.
In many ways, Fran was an accidental scientist. Initially, she didn’t envision herself working in programming. Starting as a programmer, Fran’s first assignment at IBM was to teach the research community FORTRAN, a new complex language IBM had announced just three months before. This was the start of Fran’s career-long focus on compilers for high-performance computing.
Following FORTRAN, Fran became one of three designers for IBM’s Stretch-Harvest project in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. As the language liaison with IBM’s client, the National Security Agency (NSA), Fran helped design and build Alpha, a very high-level code breaking language which featured the ability to create new alphabets beyond the system defined alphabets.
…
by Nick Higham
I learned Fortran from the TV course and book by Jeff Rohl. Some years later I came across A FORTRAN Coloring Book by Roger Emanuel Kaufman (MIT Press, 1978). The text is entirely handwritten (even the copyright page), is illustrated with numerous cartoons, and is full of witty wordplay. Yet it imparts the basics of Fortran very well and I could have happily learned Fortran from it. It even describes some simple numerical methods, such as the bisection method. The book is one continuous text, with no chapters or sections, but it has a good index. I’ve long been a fan of the book and Des Higham, and I include three quotes from it in MATLAB Guide.
…
Discussion of how to modernize Fortran, a topic of this forum, has occurred for decades. The FOR-WORD FORTRAN DEVELOPMENT NEWSLETTER was started in 1975 by Loren Meissner, author of books on Fortran 95 and earlier standards. Links:
Volume 1
Volume 4
Volume 5
The newsletter was mentioned in an interesting document
The Fortran Story Retold
Selected Reprints 1968-2011
Compiled by Loren Meissner, 2016
I recently found out that there exists an MP3 encoder “uzura3” written in Fortran 90/95. It was developed back in 2002…2004 by a Japanese developer.
Archived website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021204005320/http://members.tripod.co.jp/kitaurawa/index_e.html
Some Wall Art for your house:
John Backus and the Business of Scientific Programming
By David Alan Grier
from an article Why Fortran?, 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
J. Backus, “The IBM 701 Speedcoding System,” J. ACM, vol. 1, no. 1,
1953, pp. 4–6.
J. Backus, “Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann
Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs,” Comm. ACM,
vol. 21, no. 8, 1978, pp. 613–641.
David Alan Grier is the editor in chief of the IEEE Annals of the
History of Computing and writes the “In Our Time” column for Computer
magazine. He’s also the associate dean of academic affairs in the
Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington
University.
Also interesting:
SOFTWARE; When Few Knew the Code, They Changed the Language
By STEVE LOHR
New York Times
Published: June 13, 2001
A free Android app to learn Fortran and to have always with you a Fortran manual:
Very very anecdotal, there is a French 
village named Fortran :
Fortran - Google maps
with its little Fortran valley…
And even a beautiful Fortran Garden:
http://www.poitou-charentes.culture.gouv.fr/pages/section6/jardins/fiche.php?jar_id=427
You can even visit with Google Streets:
https://www.google.fr/maps/@46.1640925,0.201273,3a,75y,260.12h,75.34t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sN1UdQ2Nh7fd5uKk_Th-zzw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Not a Silicon Valley!
And of course nothing to do with our language…
The T-junction of Cobol Road and Fortran Road.
Intersection of Fortran Drive and Pascal Drive.
There is also a “Pascal Close” 150 m North of Fortran Road.
Several games, such as blocktran and mastermind, are under current development.
Two other Fortran games:
Colossal Cave Adventure , or Adventure , was one of the first text adventure games. The development started already in 1975. The original version was written by Will Crowther in FORTRAN for the PDP-10 time-sharing computer. Later versions of the game were often ports to other programming languages and computer platforms.
RFK-F77
A robotfindskitten implementation in FORTRAN 77 for MS-DOS
I feel it’s interesting that Fortran and Pascal “cross” on the road XD
Indeed, I wonder if these places (or roads) were named by some people with computer languages in mind, or they just “picked up” some words that may look nice for roads (actually, I don’t know how road/city/etc names are determined in various places in the world…)
