A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
August 3rd, 2026
Welcome to the 95th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Fortran. In this edition, Graham explains the wonders of a programming language that has been able to adapt in an ever-changing world; Adrian enumerates many of the wrong reasons why FORTRAN/Fortran is not at the forefront of computing today; in our Vidéothèque section, we watch "The Beginnings of FORTRAN", a documentary featuring John Backus himself; and in the Library section, we review "Teach Yourself Computer Programming in FORTRAN" by Arthur S. Radford and "A FORTRAN Coloring Book" by Dr. Roger Emanuel Kaufman.
by Graham Lee
According to Geoffrey Cain's book "Steve Jobs in Exile", the titular entrepreneur told employees at his NeXT startup that were working on their first workstation that their platform would last maybe into the mid-1990s. All computing platforms rely on their app ecosystems to move them forwards, and some half-blessed, half-cursed platforms enable killer apps that help the platform reach the stratosphere. Eventually, the platform collapses under the weight of ensuring backwards compatibility with all of that software; it cannot move forwards because its existing customer base requires that nothing changes.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski
On page 168 of the April 1988 issue of BYTE Magazine, available online courtesy of the extraordinary Internet Archive, we can read an article introducing "two new compilers" for the FORTRAN (still all in uppercase) programming language. On the other hand, page 736, section 10.5, titled "Computer Languages" of the 33rd edition of the quintessential "CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulas" by CRC Press (published in 2018), prefaced with the phrase "Common computer languages used by scientists and engineers," does not even mention either FORTRAN or Fortran. What happened in those 30 years?
In an era where your favorite JavaScript runtime is rewritten in Rust by an LLM bored at lunchtime, and we need gigabytes of RAM to render a chat application, it is remarkably humbling to look back at the primordial soup of programming. You might scoff, roll your eyes, and adjust your Neovim configuration to stubbornly ignore .f90 files. But while we debate the aesthetic merits of closures, pure functions, and pipe operators, Fortran is still quietly out there, calculating orbital mechanics, running global weather simulations, and generally doing the grown-up work of the world.
Plenty of books in my programming library are a bit battered and dog-eared. "Tim Hartnell's GIANT Book of Computer Games" has almost no spine left, having been cracked open multiple times in my childhood while I typed one of its BASIC listings into my parents' Dragon 32 microcomputer. My copy of Fred Brooks's "The Mythical Man Month" is stamped with various libraries' ex libris marks from defunct UK government organisations based in Harwell, Oxfordshire, starting with the Atlas Computer Laboratory (1961-1975), through CCLRC (Council for the Central Laboratory of the Resesarch Councils, 1995-2007), until I acquired it from the STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council, 2007-present) library. The book is held together with (hopefully archival-grade) sticky tape and a plastic binding cover.
One of the perks of running a magazine like this one consists of discovering hidden pearls in the history of computing and how these connect to one another in uncanny ways. Take, for example, the case of this month's Library choice: a book that is the forgotten kickstart point for a long series of outstanding and out-of-the-ordinary books.
