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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 t
by 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 agoYep, 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.