In an era where your favorite JavaScript runtime is rewritten in Rust by an LLM bored at lunchtime, and we need gigabytes of RAM to render a chat application, it is remarkably humbling to look back at the primordial soup of programming. You might scoff, roll your eyes, and adjust your Neovim configuration to stubbornly ignore .f90 files. But while we debate the aesthetic merits of closures, pure functions, and pipe operators, Fortran is still quietly out there, calculating orbital mechanics, running global weather simulations, and generally doing the grown-up work of the world.
This month’s Vidéothèque entry is “The Beginnings of FORTRAN”, a short low-resolution window to a long-gone time, 70 years in the past, when a guy named John Backus decided that writing machine code by hand was a tedious and inefficient.
In this video we are introduced, one by one, to the members of the original FORTRAN team and learn quite a few crunchy details about what it meant to create a programming language when there were not any to take inspiration from. For example, one of the project motivations was that the IBM 701 (one of the direct ancestors of the 1401) was simply too fast (kids: Tokenmaxxing was not a thing yet). The problem was, they could not figure out how to write code by hand fast enough to keep the machine busy; you see, “machine time” was insanely expensive back then, so you had better be running some useful program to justify the cost.
Thus, they were forced to invent a higher-level language just to keep hardware busy. Following that reasoning, I guess they could have invented video games instead, but hey, let us be honest, that would not have passed the business filters at IBM.
The uncertainty was such that whenever management asked when FORTRAN would be ready for sale, John Backus simply replied, “Come back in six months.” They kept this charade up for three straight years: take notes for your next sprint planning session (inversely, if you are a manager, beware if you hear this very sentence in said meeting).
Thankfully, Lois Haibt, who was originally hired as a “technical typist,” ended up becoming one of the brightest technical engineers in that original FORTRAN team. Take that, rigid HR job descriptions and male-only environments. As she nonchalantly mentions at 05:51,
Nothing was known about parsing. It was all invented at the time.
The team worked in such a secretive, unstructured, and intense manner that the IBM elevator operator referred to them as “the white coats,” treating them as irregular mad scientists within the otherwise buttoned-up suit-and-tie IBM corporate culture of the 1950s. And naming was already one of the most complicated things in computer science: John Backus would constantly pitch terrible names for the language. When he finally proposed “Formula Translation” (spoiler alert: “FORTRAN”), the consensus from the team was a collective groan (“I went ugh”, recalled Haibt). But they had nothing better, so it stuck. As Harlan Herrick mockingly says in 07:51:
“FOR-TRAN”. It sounds like something spelled backwards.
The punchline? The compiler this ragtag group of “white coats” built without any theoretical foundation was so terrifyingly optimal that it produced the fastest, most efficient machine code available for the next twenty years. For the following two decades, or roughly until Pascal and C and C++ (and a decade later, Java and Python) took over the professional coding markets, FORTRAN reigned as the most pragmatic approach to building software on any computer available at the time.
This video reminds me of Jim Henson’s 1967 “The Paperwork Explosion” short movie, which we reviewed earlier in this magazine, and which is also directly related to something coming from IBM. Here go some more videos for your further exploration of FORTRAN/Fortran: “FORTRAN in 100 Seconds” by Fireship and “The Untold Story of FORTRAN” on the CodeSource channel. Or jump directly to what Bret Victor had to say about it in our first Vidéothèque entry ever.
Fortran is not fashionable these days anymore, sadly. It will most probably not win you any points at your next retrospective meeting. But it is alive, it is ruthlessly fast, and as this video reminds us, it was forged by those who had to invent the wheel before they could build the car.
Watch this month’s Vidéothèque movie, “The Beginnings of FORTRAN”, on YouTube.
Cover snapshot chosen by the author.