Originally known as FORTRAN, but written in lower case since the 1990s with Fortran 90, this language was developed initially ...

Fortran was the first commercial programming language ever, and is gaining popularity thanks to the massive need for (scientific) number crunching. Welcome back Fortran," says Tiobe.

Post-Fortran, Backus worked with Danish computer scientist Peter Naur to develop a notation to describe the structure of programming languages, dubbed the Backus-Naur form.

The language that made that all possible. They called it the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code— BASIC. Before BASIC, life in the computer programming world was complicated.

Post-Fortran, Backus worked with Danish computer scientist Peter Naur to develop a notation to describe the structure of programming languages, dubbed the Backus-Naur form.

For me, it was my fourth programming language, after BASIC, PDP-8 assembly language, and PDP-8 binary (yes, I wrote binary code so I could toggle it in on the front panel of an early minicomputer).

The high-level programming language was created to eliminate machine dependency. Languages such as COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC and C were designed to run on many different computers.

John Backus, the man who led development of the first mainstream programming language, Fortran, has died at the age of 82. His lifelong mission after joining IBM in 1950 as a programmer was to ...