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Honest question, why should you use FORTRAN? Does FORTRAN have any traction outside of scientific computation?
by tored 5y ago
Honest question, why should you use FORTRAN?
Does FORTRAN have any traction outside of scientific computation?
- Jtsummers 5y agoNot really. But if you’re doing scientific computation it’s still a really good language.
- gnufx 5y agoYou shouldn't -- it's decades old. Use Fortran, which is how it's written now (though your conforming FORTRAN77 will doubtless still compile).
- tored 5y agoYes, it is my phone that autocorrects to capital letters and I can’t bother to fix it.
- leephillips 5y agoI see this type of comment often when Fortran is mentioned, and it puzzles me. What are computers for? Mainly for games and websites, with scientific computation an obscure niche? I don’t think so. Computers are for modeling the climate, predicting the weather, simulating the economy, calculating the merger of galaxies, and designing airplanes. For any of these, the high-performing languages are Fortran, Julia, C, and C++. That’s it. Lisp, Erlang, and Smalltalk are wonderful languages, but not for this.
- ngcc_hk 5y agoWhen I do Astro app I found that you want accurate calculation you need fortran. Science spill over to other areas. In fact if you check around many languages and libraries use fortran for say matrix and many other manipulation. You use matrix nearly everywhere. Btw, My first lecture in 1979 on computer science the lecturer asked exactly this question. What is the use? Why Fortean not dead by now? Why should anyone learn fortran … ba la ba la. No chance but I wish he had taught me lisp and c instead of Basic … even if not fortran.
- kergonath 5y agoIt hasn’t been FORTRAN for about 30 years now.