#history_of_programing

[itsideh]

Critical media #522

As fascinating as it is for me to think about the idea that the process of using software is actually a computer translating human languages into numeric representations in the same way that the computer can also translate the opposite from human languages into numeric representations. The fact that by using high-level programming languages makes it easier for people to forget about the machine and concentrate on what they are doing.

It was through these high-level programming languages that people were able to become capable of building their own solutions to a wide range of problems, and it no longer became necessary to have a specialized programmer in order to solve the problem.

FORTRAN is the early programming language that is especially suited to numerical computation and scientific computing. After doing some research on the FORTRAN language, I realized some interesting facts that are worth mentioning:

FORTRAN stands for Formula Translation, and since the early IBM computers back then did not support lowercase letters, the names of the versions of the language through FORTRAN 77 had to be written in all uppercase letters.

The first version of the UNIX operating system was also written in FORTRAN.

The FORTRAN 77 language, which was developed in 1977, is still in use today.

A number of new features were added to FORTRAN 90, the next version of the language, including the ability to write free-form source code, improved array handling, and others.

Object-oriented programming features were added to FORTRAN 2003 and 2008, as well as interoperability with C and C++.

New versions of FORTRAN are still being developed, and many scientists and engineers still use the language.

In the beginning, programming was a gender-neutral field because it was a new idea at the time. In my opinion, it was unimaginable that women were better at it and there was a higher demand for them because of their ability to perform repetitive, clerical tasks in an efficient manner. In addition, as a woman, I found the fact that they were being overlooked because of their responsibilities as a mother and wife in society to be very sad. Over the past few decades, women have played an increasingly important role in computer programming as a whole. Many women worked as human "computers" in the early days of computing, performing calculations for engineers and scientists manually. The number of women in computer science began to decline as the field grew and became more professional. There was an increase in the number of women studying computer science in the 1960s and 1970s, but they continued to face discrimination and bias at work. However, a number of women made significant contributions to the field, such as Ada Lovelace, considered the first computer programmer. The number of women in computer science began to drop again in the 1980s and 1990s. By the early 2000s, only about 25% of computer science workers were women. Women have been encouraged to pursue careers in computer science during the past few years, and the number of women studying and working in the field has increased. However, women still face significant challenges in the field, such as a persistent gender pay gap and a lack of representation in leadership positions. While many organizations and initiatives are working to promote diversity and inclusion in the field and encourage more women to pursue careers in computer programming, there remains a long way to go.