Fortran

since 1957 (earliest usage recorded on this site was 1963)

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM at their campus in south San Jose, California in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational physics, and computational chemistry. It is one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing and is the language used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

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rragan

mnulli

sceptreofjudah

growe

danceswithvowels

hexdump42

JamieXML

rrainey

avowkind

lawley

AndyC

brucehoult

Cema

codewritinfool

jgeorge

abtin

Uche

cdeblois

madewulf

nsmgr8

floyd

mwalling

smalltobi

Erik

rragan - 33 years

mnulli - 15 years

sceptreofjudah - 8 years

growe - 15 years

danceswithvowels - 6 years

hexdump42 - 1 years

JamieXML - 9 years

rrainey - 47 years

avowkind - 6 years

lawley - 45 years

AndyC - 1 years

brucehoult - 1 years

Cema - 44 years

codewritinfool - 2 years

jgeorge - 40 years

abtin - 2 years

Uche - 2 years

cdeblois - 5 years

madewulf - 1 years

nsmgr8 - 27 years

floyd - 2 years

mwalling - 17 years

smalltobi - 2 years

Erik - 1 years

rragan

1963–1995

First programming language

mnulli

1966–1980

I'm assuming that this refers to what we called "Fortran with Format" or "Fortran II". I used it on the IBM 1620 and 1130, CDC 6400, PDP-11, Vax.

sceptreofjudah

1969–1976

College of course.

growe

1971–1985

Ah, Fortran, my first computer language. I learned it from the old "Fortran with Watfor and Watfiv" book, and got access to the mainframe at UBC's computing centre by doing a computing student's homework for him (now it can be told - well it was almost 40 years ago). You don't hear that much about Fortran these days, but for number crunching it's still one of the best. Fortran is an abbreviation of 'formula translator' after all.

danceswithvowels

1976–1981

First job out of school. Designing and implementing real-time SCADA for oil&gas and fiber industries on Motorola 6800 and PDP-11 systems. What didn't/couldn't get done in FORTRAN was in assembler.

JamieXML

1977–1985

Picked it up in CSci, kept it for early experiments on a smokin' hot IBM PC XT at 4.77 MHz. For you kids, that's 0.008 iPhones.

hexdump42

1977

High school computing club used a subset of Fortran called Portran "portable" Fortran developed at Massey University, NZ. Programs written on pencil marked cards and processed at Databank.

joemcmahon

avowkind

1978–1983

One of my very first programming experiences, I was on a week training course from school at a local uni. I had to write a how many birds can sit on a wire simulation. Later at Uni the Fortran tutor was so bad we just bought the book and starting writing.

rrainey

1978–

AndyC

1980

Used in my first year at University running on a DEC 10 system.

brucehoult

1980

At high school

boutell

lawley

1980–

Cema