IBM developed Fortran in the 1950s for scientific and engineering calculations.
The name Fortran comes from “Formula Translation.” A team led by John Backus worked on the language at IBM, and the first compiler became available in 1957. Fortran allowed mathematical formulas to be expressed in a form closer to ordinary notation than assembly language.
Its compiler was historically important because many programmers doubted that automatically compiled high-level code could compete with hand-written machine code. Fortran’s success helped establish the practical value of compiler technology.
Fortran remains associated with numerical computing, weather modeling, physics, engineering, and high-performance computing. It is distinct from COBOL, which was designed mainly for business data processing, and from Lisp, which emphasized symbolic computation and list processing.