What Is Fortran?

Let's face it: Fortran is the oldest programming language in the world. It was designed to be used by scientists, and that's what it still does best but, don't let its age fool you! It's used for two things: numeric computation and scientific computing. So, if you're working on an app to help you calculate how much money you'll save by eating less, or if you're trying to figure out what shape of the spoon will make scooping ice cream more straightforward, then Fortran is your friend. Though the language may seem old-fashioned at first glance, it still has much life. Fortran is a programming language it's been around since 1954. But that's not all it can do! Fortran has applications in the fields of weather prediction, computational fluid dynamics and computational physics. So, if you're trying to predict whether or not it's going to rain tomorrow so that you can put your umbrella in the car before work, then Fortran is also going to be your best friend. It's also pretty popular in high-performance computing and is used in program benchmarking and ranking the world's fastest supercomputers. There's no denying it: Fortran is a language that stays here. Despite competition from languages like C and C++, Fortran is still extensively used to perform floating-point benchmark tests on new computer processors. Over the years, many scientific and engineering machines have written a vast collection of code with Fortran, allowing the language to persist. But why? Why does this language continue when others have come and gone with time? Here are a few reasons it's so popular, it’s easy to learn and designed for high-performance computing applications. It has an extensive set of built-in functions that allow you to do everything from sorting numbers to performing logical operations.