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Fortran (standardized without caps for at least the last couple decades) is current to the 2018 release. I haven't come across anybody who cares or is using it.
by metreo 7y ago
Fortran (standardized without caps for at least the last couple decades) is current to the 2018 release. I haven't come across anybody who cares or is using it. You do eventually see a lot of older code in it in symbolic and algebraic maths in the deeper code bases still because the algorithms are complex and nobody really wants to touch someone else work if it can still be wrapped in something like R or Python and is nearly as performant as C/++.
- metreo 7y agoI guess the thing about Fortran, to circle back to your question, is that it isn't common in critical infrastructure.
- moonbug 7y agoare accurate weather forecasts not part of society's critical infrastructure?
- metreo 7y agoThey are but I'm saying that the code often isn't redundant in the same way a piece of infrastructure may be.
- soneil 7y agoIt's often critical, just in a completely different field. The best explanation is simply the names - Common Business-Orientated Language vs Formula Translation. So the Fortran equivalent of the current situation was NASA being desperate for Fortran programmers to patch Voyager a few years ago (which may have been overblown - my understanding is that they had the programmers, someone just took the "what's the problem?" and ran with it). Orbital models, weather models, stuff that's deep science put into code. COBOL is stuff where business logic is put into code. They're both titans in their fields to this day - just different fields. At a very, very high level it’s essentially matlab vs excel.
- charlesap 7y agoI work at a place that writes new Fortran code today. Also c++, Python, Julia. Scientists will choose the least impedance mismatch to a library, some needed data set, or their brain.
- metreo 7y agoTo be sure. And I don't think that modern Fortran is overly obscure that you couldn't basically pick it up over a weekend from the language specification. Every modern Linux distribution has a current gfortran bundled.
- TheRealKing 7y agoModern Fortran is amazing. Force your company to move to Fortran 2008 and beyond. A good reference book is Modern Fortran Explained: Incorporating Fortran 2018.
- otabdeveloper4 7y agoThere's Fortran inside your numpy/R installation doing the heavy lifting. Not sure if there's real demand for paid Fortran programmers, but it's certainly not a dead language.
- tossup8536 7y agoBLAS benchmarks show that fortran is actually faster than C is lots of scenarios.
- metreo 7y agoSure if you turn off bounds checking or similar.
- TheRealKing 7y agoThe modern Fortran (2008-2018) is indeed used actively, although less than 40 years ago, as there are many rivals now. Just check out the Fortran GitHub projects.