The major languages appeared in the form of FORTRAN in 1957. Its name stands for FORmula TRANslating system. It was developed by a team of programmers at IBM led by John Backus for the purpose of scientific computing. The components were very simple and it was designed to allow easy translation of formulas into code. It is useful for a variety of applications such as number crunching, scientific, mathematical, statistical, and engineering type procedures.
