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MANY physicists still code in fortran. Its blazing fast for the numerics they do and pretty simple to learn. I personally would just teach them C, but there a

MANY physicists still code in fortran. Its blazing fast for the numerics they do and pretty simple to learn. I personally would just teach them C, but there are sooo many math libraries written in Fortran that it has a lot of momentum in the physics community.

quantumhobbit 18y ago
Old joke: Q:What will the scientific computing language of the 1980's but like? A:I don't know but it will be called Fortran. My undergrad physics department taught a course in Fortran because the Comp Sci department refused to teach it. It's only been a few years but I think they are still teaching it. Fortran is nearly as fast as C and far easier to use than C, so there hasn't really been a drive to switch the huge amount of Fortran code out there to C. I think that if anything kills off Fortran it will be Python or something similarly easy to teach to undergrads.
- etal 18y ago
  Yep, my school recently started teaching Python as the intro programming language -- for the bioinformatics program, at least. C, C++ and Fortran have similar enough characteristics and capabilities for scientific work that once a researcher has learned one, there's not much benefit to learning either of the others. But scripting/glue languages make it possible to hack together something in an afternoon that's impressive enough to get another scientist's attention and perhaps consider that languages do matter. I think Python will convince new scientists that C++ and Fortran deserve to be replaced, and another fast, easy-to-parallelize language will be the actual replacement.
hugh 18y ago
I'm not convinced that Fortran has any remaining advantages. Sure, a bunch of libraries (BLAS and LAPACK in particular) may be written in Fortran, but that doesn't mean you can't call them from C. Maybe there are some uncallable-from-C libraries out there that I don't know about, but I'm pretty sure the only reason physicists still use Fortran is that they have old legacy code (and/or old legacy collaborators). I use Fortran every day, and I can't stand it. But it's quite common to find physicists, even young ones, who only know Fortran.

quantumhobbit 18y ago

Old joke: Q:What will the scientific computing language of the 1980's but like? A:I don't know but it will be called Fortran. My undergrad physics department taught a course in Fortran because the Comp Sci department refused to teach it. It's only been a few years but I think they are still teaching it. Fortran is nearly as fast as C and far easier to use than C, so there hasn't really been a drive to switch the huge amount of Fortran code out there to C. I think that if anything kills off Fortran it will be Python or something similarly easy to teach to undergrads.

etal 18y ago
Yep, my school recently started teaching Python as the intro programming language -- for the bioinformatics program, at least. C, C++ and Fortran have similar enough characteristics and capabilities for scientific work that once a researcher has learned one, there's not much benefit to learning either of the others. But scripting/glue languages make it possible to hack together something in an afternoon that's impressive enough to get another scientist's attention and perhaps consider that languages do matter. I think Python will convince new scientists that C++ and Fortran deserve to be replaced, and another fast, easy-to-parallelize language will be the actual replacement.

hugh 18y ago

I'm not convinced that Fortran has any remaining advantages. Sure, a bunch of libraries (BLAS and LAPACK in particular) may be written in Fortran, but that doesn't mean you can't call them from C. Maybe there are some uncallable-from-C libraries out there that I don't know about, but I'm pretty sure the only reason physicists still use Fortran is that they have old legacy code (and/or old legacy collaborators). I use Fortran every day, and I can't stand it. But it's quite common to find physicists, even young ones, who only know Fortran.