FORTRAN in 100 Seconds 

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.

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

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

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.

When I learned Fortan in the early '70s the university computer center was open 24/7. All the serious geek students would be there in the wee hours as early AM had the best turnaround time for card batches on the 360.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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 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.

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)

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.

The loop gag is brilliant. Bravo. 👏

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I learned Basic in 1970 and Fortran in 1971...formed the basis for a lifetime. I ended up a Finite Element Stress analysis using Nastran and Patran (Abacus etc) building models with Vax 8800 clusters and running programs on a Cray YMP-28 but never forgot those early years with paper tape and cards. Those were exciting times!

Grandma? My father still remembers using punchcards at University and transitioning to a PC later.

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.

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.

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

I'm a Mechanical Engineering undergrad currently. I know my way around C, C++, VBA and Python to get some basic calculations. Recently I have joined my professor's research in finite element solid mechanics. He uses a program he and his students have written over the years, and it's written in Fortran for maximum performance. I'm going to have to learn Fortran to help him with the research. I'm very excited :D

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.

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.

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.

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

BLAS, LAPACK, FFTW3, MPI among others are the core of most computing libraries and are written in FORTRAN.

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

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

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.

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)

I have been using ForTran for software development for 50+ years. I worked for IBM for 20+ years and met John Backus at the IBM Almaden lab in California in the 80s. I was able to run M.S. ForTran 5.0 compiler on a personal IBM PC-Jr. in 1980s. I currently use the P.G. Fortran compiler on a Windows XP system compiling applications for both 32 and 64 bit systems.

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

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 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.

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

Fortran is still extensively used in scientific computations. Many, if not most, high performance, massive scientific simulations are in Fortran to this day.

Loved this video. I started with fortran on an IBM1130 in 1969. Still do software for myself in 2024 but have moved from fortran. Considered doing it again a few years ago but never did. How things have changed! I am suspicious that the rate of change is even accelerating now. Strange that change is the only constant! Tony

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

Also a full tutorial would be awesome!

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!

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.

Ahhh... takes me back to college 1989 when I learned Fortran77 on green monochrome terminals.

Yes, please! Full tutorial would be awesome! 😇

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

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 :)

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

Aprendí a usar Fortran 4 en 1973, y en realidad en México era muy difícil encontrar equipos que lo pudieran aplicar. Yo era estudiante de ingeniería civil. Fué en realidad uno de mis primeros encuentros con los programas de computación. Nada comparado con lo que ahora existe, pero así son los inicios. Me gustó encontrar esta información. Gracias.

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

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.

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

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

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. 👍🏼

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.

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.

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

Ive only heard of FORTRAN but had it not been for this, I wouldnt have known what it looks like and how to access it today. I delved really shallowly into Python (im a total absolute self-learning amateur) but now knowing this, it would make sense to learn programming and through FORTRAN, as it seems to contains the core basic principles in a clear way which could be helpful in building habits and way of thinkin for all newer languages. I enjoy this channel's educational value so much! Thanks for sharing these! Much love and respect from Bulgaria

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.

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

0:03 Correction: Fortran is the first commercially-used high-level programming language, not the first ever high-level programming language to be designed for a digital computer. It was Plankalkül, developed by Konrad Zuse in 1942-1945. The world was fighting at that time, and the implementation of the programming language idea flopped, making it remain only on paper.

APPLE II 4 KB RAM History❤ WOW Thanks Jeff

I learned FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620 in 1963. I still have my copy of the McCracken textbook. I have worked on multiple dialets on probably a dozen main-frames and mini's and the finally o PC's.

I learned Fortran, then Cobol, at uni back in the early 80's. I don't miss the noise those punched-card machines made! It was the "done thing" to shuffle your classmates program deck before it was compiled - just because we were like that ;-) Now my kids can't understand how we used to have to book "computer time" in advance to compile/run our programming assignments.

Would love to see a full tutorial!

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.

Finally, my first programming language

read my older sister's book on fortran iv back in 1980, thought it was fairly simple back then even - but didn't realize the old terminals didn't have a shift key - learn something new every day

Hello, in 1980 I worked in the Data Processing Center of a University that had a wonderful Digital Computer DEC 10, with roll tapes. I programmed in FORTRAN, the System was Administrative, of Academic Control, imagine. I already had a Teletype (TTY) keyboard that printed directly onto 132-column paper and a monochrome video monitor. I saw the girls typing some programs on punched cards, it was a huge noise. Greetings from that era. Health.

Ugh, another assembly framework? Feels like there's a new one every week! 😉

fortran77 my first language, i didnt have a computer then and i wrote programs on paper, it was 2001

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

I was doing a project in my optimization class for my math degree. My professor had a FORTRAN program that ran but did not print out the answer. He asked me to fix it so that it could print it out. It had been more than 10 years since I had last seen a FORTRAN program, but it came back to me quickly. I figured out where the answer was being stored. FORTRAN is that easy to understand.

My first programming activity (circa 1967) was using GOTRAN on the IBM 1620 for a Master's Thesis in Physics calculating Slater Screening Coefficients. Since my College had no Computer Science Dept, I continued with physics.

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.

In a "comparative Languages-CS310" back in 1980 fortran IV and fortran 77 were two of the languages we had to write the same program in. The fortran IV card deck was over a box (1000 cards) , but 77 had recursion, so it was under 100 cards.

ahhh, yes, my favourite programming language 😃

In University of Bristol 1989 to 1992 I learned and used Fortran 77 on my Physics Bachelor Degree. Did a third year project on CERN particle collision data. Does look good on my CV / resume. Good times.

I first came across FORTRAN in my grade 12 FORTRAN class, back in 1970-71. The only "hardware" I saw was a pencil and eraser, as we used pencil mark cards. These cards were the size of a standard IBM punch card, but only had 40 columns. Our teacher would take our cards to the board office, to compile them. I don't recall actually running our code. Several years later, I took a FORTRAN class at night school and did my homework on a VAX 11/780 at work. I run Linux on my home computer and could install FORTRAN on it, but haven't bothered.

Oh hey, it's MATLAB's dad.

Screw VSCode, going to program my react app using punch cards.

yes tutorial, there is no well done modern fortran tutorials on youtube. Data scientists will need it since often the reference implementation is in fortran.

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.

Great stuff...I first used simple BASIC to perform simple velocity sedimentation calculations for extremely simple cell biology calculations. This was basically plugging in numbers in a first order stationary equation. I knew BASIC was an extremely limited language but I did not need to do computations involving string variables. Then a personal problem came along: I needed to send out individual, personalized letters to the med schools I had applied to for application updates. Here, I absolutely needed to use Fortran since there was so much string variable declarations and manipulations (like proper names and addresses) which was not possible using BASIC. I would like to think that this was one of the first word processing applications for Fortran, way back in the early 70's.