What’s wrong
with the first
programming
languages?

In the new publication Filio Force it company we will talk about grandparents of modern programming languages. We will talk about Fortran, Cobol and Lisp.

FORTRAN

In 1957, when computers occupied entire rooms and programming was like encryption, the Fortran language appeared and changed the world forever. It became the first bridge between man and machine.

Fortran (from Formula Translation) was the first high-level programming language created by IBM specifically for scientific and engineering calculations.

Previously, programmes were written in machine code, which was boring, time-consuming and very complicated. Fortran allowed mathematical formulas to be expressed almost like a normal notepad. In 1957, it was a revolution. Fortran had become the language of science. It was used to write programmes for NASA’s first spacecraft, models of nuclear reactions and other complex calculations.

Fortran is still in use. Because of its speed and efficiency, it continues to be a relevant programming language, especially in scientific computing. It is also used to test the performance of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Fortran can be integrated with other programming languages such as C or Python, allowing its computing power to be combined with other capabilities.

Fortran’s extreme speed in numerical calculations is the reason why it is still used in particle physics, climate models, and financial algorithms. Without Fortran, there might not have been artificial intelligence and space missions. Fortran has shown that programming is not just about zeros and ones, but a powerful tool for realising ideas.

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LISP

The Lisp language (an acronym for list processing or ‘list processing’) was developed by John McCarthy in 1958. When most programming languages were just learning to walk, Lisp was already dreaming of artificial intelligence. This language didn’t just compute – it thought.

The Lisp language was the main tool of artificial intelligence researchers, said the specialists of Filio Force company. All because of its unique feature – the code is written simply as a list, which can be modified at runtime. No one has ever done this before. In the 1960s, Lisp became the language of the first experiments on AI. For example, ‘Eliza’ – the world’s first chatbot (it imitated a psychotherapist) was written in Lisp.

In the 1980s, the ideas of Lisp went so far that special computers were created for it, which had hardware acceleration for lists, a built-in rubbish collector, and an interactive development environment. It was the prototype of the IDE. Lisp has influenced modern programming languages. For example, JavaScript inherited functionalities, and Python took lambda functions.

Now Lisp is actively used by AI programmers, quantum computing specialists, in robotics and scientific research.

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COBOL

COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) is a programming language for working with arrays of textual information and financial data. It was created in 1959. The developers wanted the programme to be able to be understood and written by any manager. That’s why COBOL has such long and strange governing constructs: in those days it was believed that programming languages of the future would be similar to real languages.

In today’s world with many languages, COBOL programming is still heavily used in business, administrative and financial databases. When you pay with your plastic card, COBOL does the processing 95% of the time. If you are in the investment business, your stock trading is also done in it.

The language was developed during the youth of programming as such and that is why it looks strange and different from the modern ones. That is why companies can pay a lot of money to specialists who know COBOL.

Recall, in previous Filio Force Inc publications we told you about the history of programming.

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