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There are certainly some key libraries that use Fortran still. But I wouldn't say it's still "around". As a language for new projects, it's extremely niche. Tha

There are certainly some key libraries that use Fortran still. But I wouldn't say it's still "around". As a language for new projects, it's extremely niche. That's probably what "go" means in your comment. I assume you're being facetious with the "recently came across", since scipy is so common, but I will add that nearly every math-intense library is a clever wrapper for some Fortran code. I would be perfectly happy to see many hardened C libraries become the foundation of the next gen systems/ embedded languages. It does bother me slightly when we abandon the past entirely and attempt to "rewrite it in X"

jacquesm 4y ago
In part that is because once a piece of software has been part of a certification process it can be very hard to replace it by something newer, no matter how shiny or how much faster. You can see quite a bit of this in aerospace, civil engineering and so on. Nobody wants to be the one to replace the Fortran based FEA package with something novel and end up being liable for a bug.
fjfaase 4y ago
No, I was not being facetious. I am not a regular user of Python, mostly have been writing/maintaining software in C++ and (in the past three years) C#. I came across it because a colleague (fluent in Python) had used scipy.interpolate in some experimentation and now the algorithm he came up with has to be implemented in C#, so I investigated whether scipy.interpolate could be called from C# and then found out that its source was in Fortran. But just like Fortran is still used for nearly every math-intense library, mostly invisible for most of the users, I suspect that C will still be around in 50 years from now. I agree, with his observation that C should be no longer your language of choice for new projects. I personally still prefer using C/C++ for my private software projects, simply because it is the language I am most fluent in. This year I used it for AoC.
- auxym 4y ago
  Significant chunks of numpy and scipy, the "main" python packages for numerical algorithms, are wrappers around classic libraries such as BLAS, LAPACK and ARPACK, which are Fortran. Fortran was the de-facto language of scientific and numerical programming for a long time, back to the 60s even. These libraries are battle tested more than anything else out there, they literally have decades behind them, so they are industry standard and are used wherever possible.

jacquesm 4y ago

In part that is because once a piece of software has been part of a certification process it can be very hard to replace it by something newer, no matter how shiny or how much faster. You can see quite a bit of this in aerospace, civil engineering and so on. Nobody wants to be the one to replace the Fortran based FEA package with something novel and end up being liable for a bug.

fjfaase 4y ago

No, I was not being facetious. I am not a regular user of Python, mostly have been writing/maintaining software in C++ and (in the past three years) C#. I came across it because a colleague (fluent in Python) had used scipy.interpolate in some experimentation and now the algorithm he came up with has to be implemented in C#, so I investigated whether scipy.interpolate could be called from C# and then found out that its source was in Fortran. But just like Fortran is still used for nearly every math-intense library, mostly invisible for most of the users, I suspect that C will still be around in 50 years from now. I agree, with his observation that C should be no longer your language of choice for new projects. I personally still prefer using C/C++ for my private software projects, simply because it is the language I am most fluent in. This year I used it for AoC.

auxym 4y ago
Significant chunks of numpy and scipy, the "main" python packages for numerical algorithms, are wrappers around classic libraries such as BLAS, LAPACK and ARPACK, which are Fortran. Fortran was the de-facto language of scientific and numerical programming for a long time, back to the 60s even. These libraries are battle tested more than anything else out there, they literally have decades behind them, so they are industry standard and are used wherever possible.