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> Fortran is fast and has no reason to be worse than C Finding developers and maintainability. Those are two reasons.

walshemj 10y ago
Any decent developer can learn Fortran at my first job straight from high school at a world leading RnD Org. I was told to get the book on Fortran from the company library and learn it. I did have a quick hours training on how to operate the PDP 11 though.
- gravypod 10y ago
  I'm not doubting that. Anyone can learn any language. I'm more asking why should you be using Fortran when other, better suited, languages exist for the same tasks. I can understand legacy libraries. I cannot understand new projects and mission criticle systems.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    Several reasons For Fortran's use case you want to turn math into running code and all this C /C++ OOP stuff gets in way. Also any language that doesn't have arrays built in is not going to get the time of day from a technical programmer. You want the maximum performance out of your code so Python might be good for prototyping but you want to convert that to the fastest code in production.
    - gravypod 10y ago
      > For Fortran's use case you want to turn math into running code and all this C /C++ OOP stuff gets in way. Turning math into code is just as easy in both languages. The only addition that is different is adding types is mandatory in C++. You'd see more "float" or "long double"s in C/C++ code. No other difference. > Also any language that doesn't have arrays built in is not going to get the time of day from a technical programmer. Julia and Python have arrays built in, C++ has an array type, and C/C++ have pointers. > You want the maximum performance out of your code so Python might be good for prototyping but you want to convert that to the fastest code in production. With very little work you can turn prototype python code into production code with Cython. C speeds with python orchestration. This leaves out the other languages on the block like Haskell and D which are better suited for other tasks.

Any decent developer can learn Fortran at my first job straight from high school at a world leading RnD Org. I was told to get the book on Fortran from the company library and learn it. I did have a quick hours training on how to operate the PDP 11 though.

gravypod 10y ago
I'm not doubting that. Anyone can learn any language. I'm more asking why should you be using Fortran when other, better suited, languages exist for the same tasks. I can understand legacy libraries. I cannot understand new projects and mission criticle systems.
- walshemj 10y ago
  Several reasons For Fortran's use case you want to turn math into running code and all this C /C++ OOP stuff gets in way. Also any language that doesn't have arrays built in is not going to get the time of day from a technical programmer. You want the maximum performance out of your code so Python might be good for prototyping but you want to convert that to the fastest code in production.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    > For Fortran's use case you want to turn math into running code and all this C /C++ OOP stuff gets in way. Turning math into code is just as easy in both languages. The only addition that is different is adding types is mandatory in C++. You'd see more "float" or "long double"s in C/C++ code. No other difference. > Also any language that doesn't have arrays built in is not going to get the time of day from a technical programmer. Julia and Python have arrays built in, C++ has an array type, and C/C++ have pointers. > You want the maximum performance out of your code so Python might be good for prototyping but you want to convert that to the fastest code in production. With very little work you can turn prototype python code into production code with Cython. C speeds with python orchestration. This leaves out the other languages on the block like Haskell and D which are better suited for other tasks.