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Fortran is unpopular because programming is fashion driven. That is basically all. It is very suitable for it’s domain, but it’s old. Programmers have no atten
by sseagull 3y ago
Fortran is unpopular because programming is fashion driven. That is basically all.
It is very suitable for it’s domain, but it’s old. Programmers have no attention span and love new and shiny things. They would rather reimplement known solutions in new languages rather than struggle with new problems. So perfectly serviceable code and languages get left behind.
“He who knows only his own generation remains forever a child.“ — Alan Kay, quoting Cicero.
- userbinator 3y agoPopular culture is also fashion driven, and most programmers are not immune to that.
- thanatropism 3y agoThis is unintuitive, but modern fortran is a shorter jump from Matlab than Python. The greatness and wretchedness of Python is "pythonicity". It's very hard to miss the mark with Python (all things considered: life is finite, most people are more like analysts than developers, analysts deliver generally more value per hour than developers, Rust is hard to learn) but you basically need to submit to the "Pythonic" brainwashing -- which includes "anything performance-critical should be written in $fast_lang and then used from Python; but almost nothing is perf critical, and most of what's conceivably needed already exists".
- Bostonian 3y agoThere is an element of that, but C and C++ are not young either and have retained more of their peak popularity.
- spookie 3y agoI would wager Fortran is more reliant on a set of users who aren't as familiar with programming as C/Cpp people are. I assume it's easier to sell a language like Python to mathematicians, than it is for people in Computer Science. These are all assumptions on my part, and my own biases may have affected my understanding of the problem.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]