--- title: Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran | daily.dev description: An in-person and remote event titled 'Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran' will be held at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, on December 1, 2026,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/celebrating-70-years-of-fortran-kodcm1vjr twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran | daily.dev og:description: An in-person and remote event titled 'Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran' will be held at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, on December 1, 2026,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/celebrating-70-years-of-fortran-kodcm1vjr og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/koDcM1vjR.png og:image:alt: Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary An in-person and remote event titled 'Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran' will be held at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, on December 1, 2026, organized by the Institute of Computing for Climate Science. The workshop runs 14:30-18:15 with a keynote from Damian Rouson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, lightning talks, posters, and a breakout discussion on Fortran's future, followed by a drinks reception featuring a demo of the historic 'Baby' computer. Sponsors include AMD, Dell Technologies, CAKE, OpenMP, and ICCS. Attendance is free; registration closes November 9, 2026. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### When was the first Fortran manual published? The first Fortran manual was published on October 15, 1956, marking the official birth of the language for scientific computing. Over its seven decades of use, Fortran has supported critical infrastructure in nuclear engineering, weather and climate forecasting, and materials science, and remains the go-to language in these domains. _Developers tracking Fortran's long history and ongoing relevance can follow language milestones on daily.dev._ ### Is there an event celebrating Fortran's 70th anniversary? Yes, the Institute of Computing for Climate Science is hosting a 'Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran' event at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, on December 1, 2026, from 14:30-18:15, with a keynote by Damian Rouson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, lightning talks, posters, and a breakout discussion, plus remote attendance via Zoom. Registration is free and closes November 9, 2026. _Scientific computing practitioners planning conference attendance can keep tabs on Fortran community events via daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 103 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-16). **TL;DR:** Discussion mixes nostalgia and birthday wishes for Fortran with technical debates over its history (variable naming, array programming origins) and a split between those who still value modern Fortran for numerical computing and those who recall FORTRAN 77's archaic quirks (punch cards, COMMON blocks, GOTOs) with dread. **Sentiment:** 40% positive · 45% mixed · 15% skeptical **The case for** - Modern Fortran is praised as fast, readable for math-heavy code, and still ideal for numerical/array computing with less aliasing overhead than C. - Many share fond nostalgia for learning Fortran decades ago and crediting it as a gateway into broader computing concepts. - Foundational numerical libraries (BLAS, LAPACK, LINPACK) written in Fortran are still underpinning much of today's scientific computing stack. **The pushback** - Several people had painful experiences being forced to use outdated FORTRAN 77 by professors or legacy codebases well past its relevance. - Old language quirks like COMMON blocks, computed GOTOs, Hollerith strings, and six-character identifiers are remembered as genuinely bad software engineering practices. - Some argue C is now a better choice than Fortran for speed and readability in modern contexts. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Long, detailed thread blending genuine nostalgia and respect for Fortran's history with debates over etymology, legacy pain points, and whether it's still a good modern choice. **Hottest debate:** Whether the i/j/k integer-variable convention originated from Fortran's implementation constraints or was simply inherited from pre-existing mathematical notation. **Open questions** - Why exactly did some academic institutions insist on teaching FORTRAN 77 decades after newer standards existed? - How much of the modern scientific Python stack still truly depends on underlying Fortran code versus having been rewritten in C? **Highlights** > I used to work on software that still uses Fortran from the 50's and is still in maintenance and use today. IIRC, it had ~700kloc of Fortran. It may be the oldest and largest Fortran codebase still in use. My first project there was removing all of the Hollerith from the code. Since Fortran predated strings, you had to manipulate them as integers. When you tied that to the original Fortran dynamic memory system, Dynosour, which used equivalenced arrays as pointers, it was a disaster. It also gave me an appreciation for JavaBeanFactoryFactory. The original Fortran limited identifiers to six characters, the first of which indicated whether the variable was an integer, logical (bool), or real (float). I will take a 100 character name over ILBNK1 every single time. GOTOs were surprisingly not a big problem, but structured code is definitely a bit easier to read, especially since it brought the practice of indentation with it. Overall, it was a great experience but I wouldn't want to do it again, even if the work was interesting. > — [obviouslynotme on hackernews · 6 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50108671) > People sometimes scoff at computing languages as old as Fortran, but they should realize Fortran has remained relevant because it's still really good at what it does. It's syntax for mathematical operations is head and shoulders above most more recent languages. It's fast and offers great control of the hardware too. Even today, if you want to write a numerical simulation that's heavy on the math and hard on the hardware, Fortran should be considered. Everyone who has used it also has horror stories though. It is a very old language and sometimes artifacts pop up. One time I was parallelizing some older code and ran into an infuriating bug where it seemed like some boundary conditions just weren't being passed properly. There were no compiler errors or warnings. Some MPI commands were simply being ignored, but not others. It turned out that the jank-ass compiler I was using for the project had decided to go into Fortran-77 mode (without saying anything) and stripped them out in the precompiling stage (without saying anything) if they were longer than the 72 character limit that Fortran-77 had. I was coding on a computer new enough to have no CD or DVD drive, but was running into the character limit of a 60's punch card system without knowing it! > — [beloch on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111894) > > 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. It's like the last 35 years didn't happen at all. > — [sampo on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50110030) > And Fortran doesn’t just predate Lisp, it’s a direct ancestor. McCarthy was talking about LISP as a FORTRAN extension for quite a while during LISP’s development. The original Fortran is effectively LISP 0. > — [leoc on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50107334) > Mainframe-era systems often used fixed-size buffers, based on those 80-character punched cards, most addressing modes adding 12-bit immediate displacements to pointers held in registers [1] bytes and such. It is easy to laugh but C programmers have demonstrated that they can't handle variable-sized buffers on the stack, malloc(), free() and all that. Early versions of FORTRAN [2] didn't even have a stack, like you couldn't write recursive functions, the program would take parameters for array sizes when it boots and the memory layout would all be figured out at the beginning. When I was developing a display controller for persistence of vision controllers for the AVR-8 it drove me nuts how the C compiler kept moving the stack pointer around all the time for no real reason when an assembly program could move data to and from statically allocated structure. [3] FORTRAN and COBOL came out around the time Syntactic Structures did so of course there was not an established theory for how to parse grammars, no parser generators, etc. I wrote some FORTRAN programs in high school on a VAX, in a comparative programming languages class in college, converted a lot of FORTRAN algorithms into statically allocated Java in grad school in 1990 and in my postdoc I wrote a generator that wrote JNI bindings for LAPACK. [1] ... e.g. the typical struct is < 4096 bytes [2] before the FORTRAN 90 standard though you could set the /RECURSIVE flag on DEC FORTRAN befor ethen [3] we were done such a disservice by all those "it's so elegant to compute Fibonacci in a better programming language than BASIC" articles in Creative Computing because recursion is one of those things, like C's memory management, that most programmers can't really handle. > — [PaulHoule on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50106701) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104726) · 226 points · 103 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The D Programming Language Conference 2026](https://daily.dev/posts/the-d-programming-language-conference-2026-r6gdekcvf) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Your guide to GitHub Universe 2026 is here: The schedule just launched\!](https://daily.dev/posts/your-guide-to-github-universe-2026-is-here-the-schedule-just-launched--e1uw5cp0i) · GitHub Blog · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The full Meeting C\+\+ 2026 program is released](https://daily.dev/posts/the-full-meeting-c-2026-program-is-released-bp9kxgvi3) · C\+\+ · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Scalar 2026: Celebrating Functional Programming Fiesta](https://daily.dev/posts/scalar-2026-celebrating-functional-programming-fiesta-wcetkdfrl) · SoftwareMill · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Community Over Code Glasgow 2026: Inside the Schedule](https://daily.dev/posts/community-over-code-glasgow-2026-inside-the-schedule-a2u87tyo8) · The Apache Software Foundation Blog · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#computing](https://daily.dev/tags/computing), [#fortran](https://daily.dev/tags/fortran) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/celebrating-70-years-of-fortran-kodcm1vjr) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/celebrating-70-years-of-fortran-kodcm1vjr","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/celebrating-70-years-of-fortran-kodcm1vjr"},"datePublished":"2026-10-15T16:41:48.638Z","dateModified":"2026-10-16T03:24:44.358Z","description":"An in-person and remote event titled 'Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran' will be held at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, on December 1, 2026,...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--P4t4XyoV--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2001","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--P4t4XyoV--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2001","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/celebrating-70-years-of-fortran-kodcm1vjr","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"computing,fortran","timeRequired":"PT2M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/celebrating-70-years-of-fortran-kodcm1vjr#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"When was the first Fortran manual published?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"The first Fortran manual was published on October 15, 1956, marking the official birth of the language for scientific computing. 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