Why “Fortran” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
I learned to program Fortran at 13, 55 years ago, it was old then
by Taniwha · Oct 15, 2026
> One thing it did well was expressing formulas Its name stands for “Formula Translation,” after all. > I guess this was revolutionary at the time. Yes. There was some prior art…
by antonvs · Oct 15, 2026
Your experience is not universal. I used modern Fortran in undergrad and grad research from 2011 to about 2015. I rarely ever encountered FORTRAN 77 back then, and never had to…
by btrettel · Oct 15, 2026
It might actually be the other way round: Fortran adopted the convention that i,j,k are integer variables because that was the standard in maths.
by fph · Oct 15, 2026
> Have people moved on from Fortran 77? Apparently not. Fortran 90 standard was published 35 years ago, in 1991. But a majority of comments in this thread are about FORTRAN 77.…
by sampo · Oct 15, 2026
I started in 1966 with Fortran II on CDC 3500. Later I spent quality time on the IBM 1800 which has the same instruction set as the 1620.
by wglb · Oct 15, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "fortran" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "fortran" over time.
Fortran is a third-generation, compiled, imperative programming language designed for numeric computation and scientific computing. Read more on Wikipedia