I was not expecting the code to be so clean and simple.

I started learning Fortran in 1968, my first year at university studying electrical engineering. Walking around campus with stacks of cards was the top nerdy status symbol - other than drinking. A year later we headed to a lecture and found the TV set up in front showing the moon landing. No lecture that day as we watched the whole broadcast. And then we found out that the moon landing mission was written with Fortran. It put us all among the stars for that moment.

Punch cards had an 80 column limit, which is why many programmers still use the same limit in their text editors. The reason why we always use 'i' as the variable in a for loop also comes from Fortran. Because of the 80 character limit, code had to be as small as possible, and since 'i' was the first (implicit) integer available, that was used.

First programming language I learned many decades ago. Discovered I had a knack for it, diverted my studies from electronics to software. Was the beginning of a long and prosperous career. Very grateful for that course.

Cool to see Fireship showcasing the hot new technologies. Surely this one will blow up soon

My dad was a convinced Fortran user for 30+ years. He did use it to perform FFTs on gigantic complex number matrices and solve huge complex differential equations for his job. They performed cutting-edge radar imagery with a language that was invented 50 years ago! At almost real time! Now he's happily retired and all i learned at uni is matlab and java :(

Fortran was my first language. One correction, programmers wrote their code out on paper. Data entry operators then typed it onto punch cards. Loved this by-the-way, brought back so many memories.

I programmed in Fortran 77 back in the early 1980s. It was my favorite language until I got a job programming in C. I still have fond memories of my days with Fortran on a DEC VAX 11/780.

As someone who has actually had to use Fortran for physics research, I appreciate this greatly. It's old, weird, and creaky, but at least it has a relatively small keyword list and none of those obnoxious semicolons.

Definitely did not expect this one. Gave me flashbacks to my first year scientific computing class, where I had to code everything in Fortran

I am retired from an Aerospace company, and back in the early 80's I was as assigned to JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) and the ground software was all written in VAX/VMS FORTRAN. I spent 14 years working there mostly in FORTRAN then in Ada (an ungodly language). Other programmers wanted to work in c and c++, but when layoffs hit, they kept us FORTRAN people because no one else wanted to do it.

Man, this brings back memories. I had an Apple II - after I got tired of my Radio Shack TRS-80. I just did BASIC on those, though, taking my high school’s very early computer science class. I didn’t learn FORTRAN until college. We spent a lot of hours in the engineering computer labs working on our programs. I’d bring my coffeemaker with me and we’d sit at those computers until the middle of the night. The world sure has changed in 40 years. Now, we carry our computers with us everywhere and use them to order coffee...

It is also a full OOP language. Classes, whole array operations and operator overloading are among the most favorite features of Fortran. [For negative responders: criticizing older versions such as FORTRAN 77, is the equivalent of criticizing pre-ANSI C, which is not quite normal. Do not criticize unless you know what you are talking about: just check the features of the latest version of the language: Fortran 2018. Computer scientists and electrical engineers were never taught (modern) Fortran; Fortran was used mainly by mechanical and aerospace engineers. That's the only reason that you do not know it. Fortran is best for a single thing: fast calculations, nothing more.]

I took a FORTRAN class in college in the 90's. Even back then my professor asked "Why are you here?" He knew FORTRAN from when it was necessary, and he wanted us to use things that were more modern.

This is the language that I got taught in my second semester of electrical engineering back in 2014, this is how I learned the fundamentals of programming and why it was so easy for me to grasp programming with newer languages now that I'm self learning to switch careers.

Yes, more please. Modern languages owe a lot more to FORTRAN than it's given credit for. A fun one is in the development of those optimising compilers you mentioned, where trying to develop a good FORTRAN compiler led to all sorts of ways to design better languages.

Fireship in 100 seconds next please. (Also the real first)

Many of python's most popular machine learning/artificial intelligence/scientfic computing libraries rely on Fortran code, Also the current standard is actually Fortran 2018, And there are two great compilers currently in the works, the official LLVM one named Flang, And another one named LFortran which aims to execute Fortran code interactively as well as being able to compile it.

I worked as a professional Fortran programmer from 2015 to early 2019 and I really loved the language. We used the Fortran 90/95 standard and the code was quite modularized and clear. We also used some 2003 features. The original code was from the mid 90's, but we were allowed to use modern features. The code was very easy to follow, not like people would think a Fortran program looks like. I've seen ancient F77 code that is a pain to read, but I've also seen C and C++ code that was way uglier than a well designed F90 program. I work as a strictly C++ developer now, and I've seen some ugly C++ code. I guess it's just a matter of who is the developer more than the language used. Fortran 2003 is a very nice language to use, but as its origin is so old and it's used for high speed computations so it's very different to modern languages. I really enjoyed working with Fortran, and besides that, it was the first programming language I learned at university.

I programmed Fortran on VAX/VMS many years ago and we did verify the assembly code generated (Aircraft Industry). Sometimes we coded directly in assembler. We did some tests and came to the conclusion that you only gained about 6% - 10% performance by coding assembly code directly vs in Fortran. It was so optimized.

I think this would be a great point to introduce OpenMP (and later on MPI). OpenMP works great with both C and FORTRAN

I would love not only to see a full tutorial, but some examples of modern use cases and projects would be nice as well.

I started engineering school in 1972. FORTRAN IV was my first exposure to high level programming. It ran on the university’s DEC PDP10. It’s still a pretty friendly language.

I literally searched this up back when I first found your channel and series; this is exactly what I was waiting for

I would personally love to see more Fortran. Fortran was the second language I ever used after learning C.

This is a very good overview of Fortran. I was one of those average humans. I worked at AERE Harwell in the early 70's and saw the transition from punched cards, paper tape and teletypes to Visual Display Units (VDU). With punched cards the program turnaround time from punching the cards to getting your results returned was three days. So I was explaining to my son that you couldn't really build a spreadsheet app in the days of punched cards. Imagine - change the contents of cell C3 and wait for a few days to get the results :) On the other hand, calculating the Swarzchild radius of a black hole was a cinch.

Great video! Incredible how Fortran is presented in 100 seconds. Need to look for more of these videos.

Great video, as always, loving these short history lessons

YES please. A full tutorial would be awesome, especially for those of us in engineering

My first programming language. Interesting to see it being explained here after not seeing or using it in so long.

Good memories. I never used it in the real world but I took a couple of Fortran classes in college and really enjoyed them. The computer lab was open 24x7 and I usually went around midnight when it was mostly empty to do my programming. The good ol' days.

I learned more about FORTRAN in 100 seconds than I learned in a semester from an engineering professor. I subsequently learned C from a computer science class and programming made sense thereafter.

One card represents 1 line of code. WOW. Programmers back then must be so sharp in thinking and seeing. They cant afford mistakes after punching 100 cards.

This series is so great, please continue it. And maybe you want to create a video playlist "... in 100 seconds", cheers.

Yes! I would like to see a full tutorial, thank you for this! The best 100 seconds I've spent all year, perhaps!

I do like these little videos on obscure languages. Keep up the good work mate!

Thanks man! I'm currently learning Fortran and I appreciate all the help!!

Was waiting for this one, thanks!!! Out of curiosity, the latest Fortran standard is 2018, which introduced a lot of OOP related stuff, so grandpa can still pack a mighty punch! It's also pretty good at gpu computing, interfacing well with CUDA and openacc, so i recommend giving it a try if you're trying to code a fast numerical kernel :)

The loop gag is brilliant. Bravo. 👏

Wow, does this bring back memories. We had Fortran training in high school in the mid-70's, thanks to equipment donations and computer time donated by a major chemical manufacturer in our town. We had keypunch machines installed in the classroom, the card batches would be sent over to the manufacturer's computer center at night, and we would have the runs of our programs back in the morning.

Had to use it for a scientific computing module before. It may be old but it has a solid foundation, and has nice features for working with arrays, which is what makes it great for linear algebra. It's quite simple too with not a lot of keywords. Overall I liked it, but don't have much use for it outside of that niche.

Ahhh! Such memories. My dad was the Head of the Computer Department of a major governmental body in the 1960's. He taught me binary numbers when I was 6 and how to program in Fortran when I was 10.

Dude this series is insane … amazing, really Amazing work

Love these short explainers. Not enough information to get good at the language, but enough to destigmatize people who are scared of "more difficult" development.

Yes, please! Full tutorial would be awesome! 😇

If you wanted to obtain a result from a subroutine, you need to specify the "intent" of the variable you declare. So, for instance, if you wanted to pass two integers and return their sum, you could have something like, subroutine addition(sum, a, b) implicit none integer, intent(in) :: a, b integer, intent(out) :: sum sum = a + b end subroutine Then, if you can call that subroutine in your program as, program myMath implicit none integer :: sum call addition(sum,1,2) end program myMath and it will set the variable "sum" equal to 3.

I love these in 100 seconds videos thank you for your work

Whole video is a clean and simple introduction, nice work!

I definitely love to see a full Fortran tutorial, please make it happen Jeff 👐🏻

I learnt Fortran 77 at uni a few years back. My dad, who studied comp sci in the 80s, also learned Fortran 77. When asked why we still use it, the lecturer said it compiles extremely efficiently compared to other languages. I actually rather liked it as a language, though I was unable to get a compiler working on my own machine once the course was over and have since not used it for some years. (though I do believe I still have the code I wrote)

YES, thank you, I would love to see a full tutorial. I'm not sure it's worth your time to create it, but I would definitely watch it if you did. Thanks for the summaring work that you're doing.

Thx for this trip down memory lane…wrote my first program for IBM360@UCSC in ‘74. It was for hyperbolic functions describing Laminar Shear trajectories on a Lifting Body

Wow they're really creating JS frameworks like crazy but this one seems promising! Full tutorial please

Modern Fortran is by far the best choice for number crunching. We use it all the time because it is light weight, simple, clean, and sometimes even faster than C (especially if you know how to code efficiently, and how arrays are handled in Fortran). Not to mention that Coarray Fortran allows us to program to run scripts in parallel.

Currently working with someone on a project that uses Fortran. Some really interesting functionality this thing has.

Fortran was my second computer language. The first was Easycoder for the Honeywell H200 mainframe. I started working for Honeywell back in '65 as a field engineer. I taught myself Fortran out of curiousity. Wondered how a computer without floating point number capability could do floating point arithmetic. Wrote a mortgage amortization program to test out the idea. It worked and has served me well over the years.

Great video! I’m working with a group of researchers modeling heat transfer and fluid flow. All of our codes are FORTRAN codes, so it was nice to see this one come up. It’s not the most modern or practical language by any means, but man is it computationally powerful.

You know what Jeff, you got me. I *do* want to watch a full tutorial about Fortran.

You did a good job describing Fortran.

Although I was formally taught Algol and Basic, most of the programming that I did during my working life in scientific research and development was in Fortran. Very easy to pick up if you already know one high-level language. I adapted to Pascal fairly easily because of its similarity to Algol. By the time C and C++ came along, I had moved on to system management, so I never got to do any serious programming in C.

Back in the dark ages, I learned Fortran before learning Pascal. I was a big-time geek, so I loved coding with both of them!

I started my career as a professional programmer with Fortran 77. At Uni I had done most of my programming in (Turbo)Pascal, switching to Fortran 77 was a big step backwards. I have never learned to love it.

I learned and used Fortran on cards in the mid 1960s in electronic engineering classes. Wow it really made work much easier. Straight forward.

Full tutorial? Yes please! Never really had a chance to do even a little fortran.

Also a full tutorial would be awesome!

My #2 after COBOL. I learned both on punch cards. Love this! Thanks for the memories!

WOW! Cool! Gosh this takes me back. Fortran was my first programming language back in 1971, in high school. And I definitely remember the punch tape we created on the punch-tape machine so it could be taken to the local university to be run on their mainframes! My last programming language before I retired was C#. In between was BASIC, COBOL, IBM Assembly, JCL, Pascal, Modula-2, T-SQL, and Visual Basic. Those were the days, my friend.

How interesting, I have just recently taken an interest in Fortan and installed the compiler on my linux box and wrote my first hello world program. Would love to see a longer length tutorial video. Very cool. 👍🏼

Fortran was the "Spreadsheet" of the 60's, 70's and into the 80's. Lotus 123 wasn't out yet nor was Excel. In the beginning Fortran was limited to only 76 Characters (the last 4 positions on the Punch Card was for the sequence number, to sort the deck if you dropped it). Between Fortan, BAL and COBOL there was much that couldn't be done in Data Processing in the "Old Days". Fortan is how we got a man on the moon.

I would pay for a FORTRAN tutorial, and I'm pretty committed to learning as much as I can WITHOUT spending money. This is really interesting.

i learned fortran this year in university (upm madrid), its still used sometimes in aerospace engineering

Cool. Even when I had no particular interest in a language beyond what I needed for uni or work, it was interesting to discover new things. REXX was the first interpreted language I discovered and that led me to Perl - the rest is a fairly well trodden path. Thanks for the vid

Great video! Could you do APL in 100 seconds, it's quite an overlooked programming language but very interesting

My father said he was programming in Fortran for 15 years before he truly understood it, and for 25 before he truly saw the beauty of it. You can thank him for the fact that your electric clocks all run on time.

I was lucky enough to be of the generation that got taught Fortran in high school applied math class. What a great introduction to general computing that was for someone that went on to be an engineer not a programmer.

Thank you much for this clean concise content

It is so nice finally the language I am using daily got covered! 😇 I always wonder if it has become a legacy...

Ah Fortran, the only language that was ever capable of butting heads with C

man that brought back memory's of fortran77 in the old days thanks for sharing :)

Wow. I typed a few thousand lines of my own FORTRAN 77 and WATFIV code on IBM 029 keypunches (and, for a very short time, with a line editor from a terminal) starting in 1978. This video did a remarkable job of covering the language, including features that didn't exist in FORTRAN IV, FORTRAN 77, or WATFIV. And yes, my jobs were submitted to a mainframe that filled a raised-floor, Halon extinguisher protected, heavily cooled room and included two or three 60 MB hard disk drives each the size of a top-loading washing machine, as well as nine-track tape drives straight out of 1960s science fiction movies. Ironically, I could have watched this video on a belt-clip portable computing device with thousands of times the data storage and computing capability of that (even then) outmoded IBM 370 (though instead of my Pixel 7, I watched it on my home-built, Linux operated desktop computer). I think it got lost/tossed in my last move, but I used to have a pin-feed paper print of the FORTRAN source code for the original Colossal Cave Adventure game, the grandfather of Zork! and all those other text command adventures that were so big before computer graphics got good enough and fast enough to play in video.

Would love to see a full tutorial!

This video brings memories of sheer pain and joy at the same time. I started programming with Fortran95 in 2014, it was a necessary module for my Theoretical Physics degree. This was the hardest part of that whole degree, it almost made me cry on daily basis. Errors made very little sense, language was old, any material worth reading was pre-1990s, and asking for help online was almost pointless. It almost made me quit physics and programming. Almost 8 years later now, and I work as a software developer. Fortran 95 made me learn the fundamentals of programming in such a difficult way, that no coding related task has ever felt difficult since. I am almost grateful to this language.

Yes, I would like to see a full tutorial. Thanks for asking!

Brings back memories! Back in the 80s I got a Sharp MZ80k which had loadable operating systems on cassette tapes. I had tapes for BASIC, FORTH and FORTRAN. It was so cool to learn those different languages. And I became a developer after finishing high school.

It can do loops, you just need to feed it with a punchcard over and over and over Dave.

Believe it or not, I was programming in Fortran in 2014! By then, it was a decent object oriented language.

Thanks. It is real long time ago i did FORTRAN still learned something new about it.

My first programming job was for an operational system written in FORTRAN on an HA pair of PDP-11/44 running RSX-11M. The year was 1993. You can run into very old systems sometimes.

It's funny how Fireship just made Fortran interesting for me, while my university teacher litterally made me sleep and made it look too difficult.

I would love to see a 100 seconds video to Open Source licenses!

I programmed in Fortran in 1971. It is a beautiful and useful language.

I appreciate it. A lot of people seem to forget that fortran ist still actively used and developed. I was teached to program in Fortran just a few years ago since it's still the most efficient language for math heavy programs. Fortran is a bit clunky, but I appreciate the neat code.

My mom got her start in the computer industry in the 1970s as a keypunch operator punching in Fortran code. She learned enough from punching the cards in to actually write code herself and after a few years she learned COBOL and became even more valuable. I followed in her footsteps and worked as a programmer for well over 20 years.

APPLE II 4 KB RAM History❤ WOW Thanks Jeff

My dad told me he used Fortran for his dissertation thesis. I remember messing with punch cards when I was like 7 years old (i'm 42 now... you do the math) and it was the most awesome thing ever! Thank you for a nice and clean overview of this tech! It was hot stuff back then!

Finally, my first programming language

Fortran was/IS an awesome language . Nothing complicated, and very effective for procedural programming. Rumour is that PrimeOS (the OS for Prime computers) was written in Fortran.

I had a high school friend who is an engineer now. He works for this company and I remember he told me that they started back on the 80s and the entire core of their system still runs or Fortran. It's like COBOL, old but still reliable.

Brings back some memories. My first job out of university in 1992 was to maintain an old Fortran program that produced printed cartographic maps (similar to Google Maps). As part of the first major enhancement, I rewrote it in C++. I'd tutored Fortran to engineering students at Uni and didn't want to touch it again...

I work a lot with a Fortran 77 code. It's absolutely a mess of a program, almost impossible to debug with GO TO statements all over the place. But I highly respect the people who made science work before out modern software tools were invented.