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This looks more like a case study of program language use for a specific set of scientists. Can someone explain why Fortran remains popular within the scientif

• speedgoose 3y ago
  Legacy scientific code is my guess. Fortran isn’t that efficient[0] and many programming languages are preferred[1]. 0: https://states.github.io/files/j2.pdf https://states.github.io/files/j2.pdf 1: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-de...
• kergonath 3y ago
  Because it’s simple to grasp, easy to write, well-suited to the fields in which it is used (things like first-class multidimensional arrays, native complex numbers, good auto-vectorisers, things like OpenMP…), and quite efficient. It is quite interoperable (it’s easy to use anything that is callable from C). It’s easy to archive some code and be sure that it’ll run in the foreseeable future. Overall, it is a nice language to work with if you’re doing scientific computing. The rest of the world does not care much about its strengths.