4 ms·
Not disagreeing, more curious, but isn't Fortran still in relatively common use in Scientific computing? I haven't gotten into that domain, but I guess it is pr
by brobdingnagians 8y ago
Not disagreeing, more curious, but isn't Fortran still in relatively common use in Scientific computing? I haven't gotten into that domain, but I guess it is probably far below where it was at it's peak. Maybe it is just that we are getting lots of languages good for certain niches, instead of one general purpose language dominating multiple niches.
- fhrow4484 8y agoYeah, I'm not expert on Fortran use back in those time, it's just more used as an example of a language that at one point in time was much more popular than another. For instance the amount of Fortran code and libraries in 1979 was probably order of magnitude bigger than the amount of C code. Was there more general purpose language that C was competing with back in the time? I guess picking C as the old language and C++ as the new would have make the example clearer :) But yeah I agree, and believe Fortran is still being used heavily in scientific computing!
- pjmlp 8y ago> Was there more general purpose language that C was competing with back in the time? Plenty of Algol and PL/I variants. C had an almost free OS with source code going for it, had UNIX been a commercial offering right from the start with a price tag similar to systems like OS/360 or VMS, and the outcome would have been completely different.
- stochastic_monk 8y agoIt sure is. My colleagues in Mech E and atmospheric science all write fortran. I imagine this is common for technically proficient fields which aren’t computer science or engineering but still need efficient solutions, making starting from scratch in a more modern language prohibitively expensive.