4 ms·
For sure, there are a few cases like the one you mention (I personally work with this kind of code in a daily basis), but that's not the reason most people use
by yiyus 7y ago
For sure, there are a few cases like the one you mention (I personally work with this kind of code in a daily basis), but that's not the reason most people use Fortran. There are many libraries with a level of robustness and performance that you won't find anywhere else, there are highly optimized compilers, and it is the standard language in many fields.
It's also quite safe for non-programmers. Those non-programmers write complex algorithms, but the code itself is not "clever and completely un-idiomatic". Most often, it is quite naive, just a series of formulas one after the other. You will find very long subroutines, bad names, some obvious inefficiencies, and maybe some spaghetti, but nothing to be afraid of.