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Fortran-90 is well constrained for numerical programming and has so much inertia in the scientific community, it’s probably not going away. But C and its deriv
by projektfu 5y ago
Fortran-90 is well constrained for numerical programming and has so much inertia in the scientific community, it’s probably not going away. But C and its derivatives are good enough at numeric work for most users outside of science. Many have tried to dislodge both C and Fortran from their positions, with varying levels of success. Maybe we’ll see it in the next decade as scientists who knew how to code before university dominate and no longer want to use Fortran.
- blacktriangle 5y agoHaving learned to code and getting a degree before going to get a job at a shop that had a ton of Fortran floating around, I'd say I grew to appreciate how direct it was for just doing math. And after working at later jobs where the scientists were allowed to write code in more expansive expressive languages than just Fortran, I really came to appreciate how Fortran enabled scientists to do science in such a way that they did not write unholy abominations of python code.
- yiyus 5y agoYou are absolutely right. To be honest, the current situation is not too different from this hypothetical case. Fortran is used mostly to write numeric routines and then we call them from a Python script, instead of writing text and arguments processing (for example) directly from Fortran. But I still find interesting thinking about where these languages would be if these limits had been consistently respected.