The Untold Story of FORTRAN

Cut Code Review Time & Bugs in Half - https://coderabbit.link/codesource At the Westinghouse-Bettis nuclear power lab, a heavy cardboard box arrives from IBM. Inside is a thick stack of punched cards—about two thousand—no manual, no explanation. Just a rumor: this might be a FORTRAN compiler. They have never seen one. IBM isn’t even ready to ship a final version yet. But if it works, it could free them from hand-coding endless missile and reactor calculations in raw machine instructions. They load the deck, add a tiny test program in the new language, and wait while the reader clatters through the cards. The program runs. The numbers are correct. Nobody in that room quite grasps it yet, but this accidental shipment has just proved something radical: a machine can translate algebra-like formulas into efficient code, fast enough for serious scientific work. To see how unlikely that moment really is, we have to go back—before FORTRAN, before IBM’s mainframes, to a world where computation