I was talking to a maths prof a year ago or so. It seemed that there was some Fortran stuff, although C++ seems the favourite. Personally, back in the days, I

I was talking to a maths prof a year ago or so. It seemed that there was some Fortran stuff, although C++ seems the favourite. Personally, back in the days, I never really got into the NAG libraries. I found it easy enough to roll my own. Maybe some of the stuff can save you time, but I ended up preferring hand-coding my algorithms. The greatest thing to happen to Fortran was Fortran 90. None of that column malarky. Modules was kinda OK, but if I wanted to use well-structured code I probably wouldn't be starting with Fortran anyway. I don't think ANYONE I knew at the time used to new features other than format-free. I tried poking around with allocatable arrays at one point, but didn't like it. I guess it was Fortran's way of trying to be like C. One thing that is rarely discussed is that a programming language isn't just specification, but it is a culture and philosophy shaped by the programmers themselves. One guy made a reference to Cobol, and how object-orientation was an unused feature. He said that what the designers failed to consider is that Cobol programmers just don't "do" object-orientation. Fortran - even Fortran 77 (IIRC) has some nice little features, like being able to specify parameters in a separate file, and read them in one line. I doubt most of the other guys in the faculty were aware of that feature at the time. And my standard anecdote ... when I went to a new job, they actually had a little bit of programming in Fortran. We had Visual Fortran. I had to set up the environment to fiddle with something for a client. Set-up was straight-forward. I opened the project file, and the things opened and compiled without a single hitch. I was shocked - shocked I tell you - at how simple the set-up was. Normally one would expect endless futzing around to get the programming environment and libraries in place. But that's not the real anecdote. One day I was passing by a meeting room. I overheard an outside consultant in discussion with some of our guys about a replacement for Fortran. He was going on about how flexible the system would be, and hey, it you needed to set up extra parameters you could always add them to an XML configuration file he was proposing. And I thought to myself ... my God, that's complicated. In Fortran, you can read an array into a file in one statement. Bam! His method would have involved external libraries and some serious effort to get going. I always joke that people should be forced to write Fortran for at least a year. For those that want to be JavaScript developers, two years. That should make people think much more simply about what it is you're trying to do. A year ago I added programming microcontrollers to my list of things programmers should be forced to do. A resource-constrained environment should focus their minds a little more.