Old Glories: Fortran and Cobol are still among the world's most popular programming languages despite being almost 70 years old. They're certainly overachieving, but for entirely different reasons, ...

1956: Fortran, the first modern computer language, is shared with the coding community for the first time. Three years in the making, it would be refined in work that continues to this day. While this ...

John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82. Mr. Backus died ...