Despite its history it is a pretty modern language if you enable all warnings, set implicit none and ignore the old style of coding (a la FORTRAN 77 of older).
I had read about him and about his FP language early in my career, when I was reading up on all kinds of computer subjects.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRIMOS
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livermore_Time_Sharing_System
[2] https://webhome.weizmann.ac.il/home/fhlevins/RTF/RTF-TOC.htm...
from the Wikipedia article about Fortran, under the Science and Engineering section:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran
Although a 1968 journal article by the authors of BASIC already described FORTRAN as "old-fashioned",[58] programs have been written in Fortran for many decades and there is a vast body of Fortran software in daily use throughout the scientific and engineering communities.[59] Jay Pasachoff wrote in 1984 that "physics and astronomy students simply have to learn FORTRAN. So much exists in FORTRAN that it seems unlikely that scientists will change to Pascal, Modula-2, or whatever."[60] In 1993, Cecil E. Leith called FORTRAN the "mother tongue of scientific computing", adding that its replacement by any other possible language "may remain a forlorn hope".[61]
It is the primary language for some of the most intensive super-computing tasks, such as in astronomy, climate modeling, computational chemistry, computational economics, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, data analysis,[62] hydrological modeling, numerical linear algebra and numerical libraries (LAPACK, IMSL and NAG), optimization, satellite simulation, structural engineering, and weather prediction.[63] Many of the floating-point benchmarks to gauge the performance of new computer processors, such as the floating-point components of the SPEC benchmarks (e.g., CFP2006, CFP2017) are written in Fortran. Math algorithms are well documented in Numerical Recipes.
That didn't age well.
My professor working on control system analysis for electrical power grids later thought that if he were to write it today, it would likely be done in matlab.