Today’s top developers learned to code through a number of very different pathways. We mentioned BBC BASIC earlier, but we didn’t mention FORTRAN, COBOL or any of the Algol family, which were de rigeuer for scientists, mainframe operators and academics respectively back in the day.
FORTRAN (originally FORmula TRANslator) was developed by IBM in the 1950s and quickly became the gold standard for scientific computation and engineering. It’s still in use today, particularly on supercomputers working on numerically difficult problems such as weather prediction, fluid simulations and crystallography. BASIC was largely based on FORTRAN II. And Fortran (the dated portmanteau and shouty capitals have since been left behind) continues to be updated to accommodate
