Hello World in the oldest programming language

Jun 22, 2026

The oldest high-level programming language still in use today is Fortran, born in 1957 at IBM. It was originally built for scientific and engineering calculations, and it is still used today across science, weather forecasting, and high-performance computing.

Printing "Hello, World!" in Fortran

program hello
    print *, "Hello, World!"
end program hello

Save it as hello.f90, then compile and run:

gfortran hello.f90 -o hello
./hello

The output:

 Hello, World!

A small note

If you count from the design side, Plankalkül (designed around 1942 to 1945) is older, but it was not actually implemented until decades later. So when it comes to a language that was genuinely used and has lasted, Fortran is the winner.