4 ms·
Fortran is a beast. People crap on it all the time yet use it often millions of times a day without realizing it.
by thumbuddy 3y ago
Fortran is a beast. People crap on it all the time yet use it often millions of times a day without realizing it.
- chii 3y ago> People crap on it all the time only clueless people looking for clout online!
- skissane 3y ago> Fortran is a beast. People crap on it all the time I think most of the people who "crap on" Fortran, when they say "Fortran", mean FORTRAN 77, not Fortran 2018
- smcl 3y agoI don't think Fortran gets beaten up that much, it's just sort of ... ignored
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoThere are only two kinds of languages...
- ilyt 3y agouse in what ? I severely doubt anything I do touches fortran millions times a day unless it's google search that runs on it.
- is_true 3y agoYour weather report
- ilyt 3y agoI don't use that million times a day. Maybe once a week
- dylanowen 3y agoThe banking system.
- colejohnson66 3y agoI thought banks used COBOL?
- dylanowen 3y agoI bet you're right and that I'm misremembering. I learned about it in the context of fronting mainframes with graphql so I wasn't thinking too much about the backend language.
- skissane 3y ago> I thought banks used COBOL? Banks have all kinds of random legacy crap written in all kinds of random languages. While COBOL is a lot more common, I guarantee you there are plenty of banks with bits of Fortran in their code bases. It is particularly found in older code for economic modelling, etc Back in the old days, a lot of apps were written in Fortran that would never be written in that today. I used to work for a university where the application used to determine whether a student had met the graduation requirements for their degree was written in Fortran. Why Fortran? It was a manual process, then one of the professors offered to automate it for them, and he wrote the app in Fortran, because that was the language he was most comfortable with. And 30 years later they were still running it (although they finally replaced it with a COTS package when I worked there) I once worked with an insurance company for whom a key business application was written in Turbo Pascal for DOS. They wrote it back in the 1980s when everyone had DOS machines. By the 2010s they were still running it in a VM. For all I know they are still doing that today
- ilyt 3y ago> million times a day
- dylanowen 3y agoAnother poster pointed out I was probably misremembering cobol. Either way, your example was google searches. You don't search millions of times a day so you have to be talking about backend functions? The banking system could easily hit a million function calls in a day related to you or data you care about.
- oblio 3y agoAre you sure you've looked inside all those .dlls and .sos you use every day? At the end of the day Fortran is compiled and it can just create dynamic libraries which program you use depend on, and you'd never know. Heck, I wouldn't bet against using me using at least 1 Cobol library once per month, you never know what kind of craziness is going on behind the scenes.
- thumbuddy 3y agoEver use BLAS or LAPACK?
- xioxox 3y agoAs a Fortran user, it's pretty awful for string handling. It's fine for numerics. However, there's a lack of libraries for non-numeric stuff (e.g. data structures). The free compilers are buggy, too.