Fortran for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: If You Need Superior Math Capabilities for High Tech Jobs, You May Want to Learn the Scientific Language"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

FORTRAN is one of the two earliest "high-level" computer languages for computer careers. The other was COBOL.

"High-level" means that FORTRAN is a step up from computer assembler language. Be thankful that programmers no longer directly instruct computers with long series of 0s and 1s. Because no matter how much faster and bigger our computers are, they are still simply manipulating long series of 0s and 1s. FORTRAN was an important advance in its time.

It was essential that computer programming become faster and more efficient. Businesses simply could not wait forever while their programmers fed in those 0s and 1s. Therefore, some smart people came up with high level languages such as FORTRAN, and that’s what we think of today as computer languages.

FORTRAN was designed for use by scientists not just for computer jobs.

It stands for Formula Translator. It works well with high precision numbers and has a large number of trigonometric routines.

Fortran is not a beginner’s language, although QBasic was based on it in some ways.

FORTRAN has improved over the years and is still popular with scientists, though it’s lost some ground to PL/I, Pascal, C and C++.

And because it is such a valuable tool for scientists, this greatly reduces the demand for Fortran programmers, because the scientists often no how to program what they need for themselves.

In short, don’t bank on FORTRAN for your programming computer career.

Next: COBOL

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