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"Recent" in this case is still before many current programmers were even born. 25 years ago isn't really recent anymore. As for FORTRAN, there are a couple of

by beat 13y ago

"Recent" in this case is still before many current programmers were even born. 25 years ago isn't really recent anymore. As for FORTRAN, there are a couple of reasons. First, the ability to skip a pointer dereference on large tables for performance, and second, the existence of fine and ancient libraries for well-known problem spaces. I used to work with some old Cray guys, and they would rant about how FORTRAN was the best language ever on purely performance grounds.

hga 13y ago
Indeed for "recent", but then again we're discussing a language which first appeared in 1958, 3 decades before the cause I posit for the mainline/CL community becoming ... not so nice. Note that I don't really know, I left it for Scheme by the middle of the '80s. Is no one writing large bodies of new FORTRAN code? Or is it mostly in COBOL style maintenance mode, and e.g. called a lot by Python, which I gather is getting a lot of attention in the scientific community (I started with IBM 1130 punched card FORTRAN "IV" in 1977 in a academic year long class, but stopped after that, it wasn't an answer for the sorts of problems I was interested in, C and Lisp are).
- beat 13y ago
  I dunno. I haven't looked at what's going on with FORTRAN in a meaningful way in years. It might largely fall on how algorithms designed to exploit long-obsolete vector processors have been adapted to work on modern, highly parallelized supercomputer networks, with powerful but conventional individual nodes separated by really slow networks.
- emkemp 13y ago
  Fortran is very heavily used for development in numerical weather prediction. For example, the WRF model (http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users) includes hundreds of thousands of lines of code and has been under continuous development since the late 1990's. And Fortran has evolved significantly in the last two decades, absorbing many features (and lessons learned) from other languages. Structures, modules, encapsulation, argument checking, pointers, allocatable arrays, classes, inheritance, function overloading, pure functions.... Wikipedia has a decent summary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran).

by beat 13y ago

hga 13y ago

Indeed for "recent", but then again we're discussing a language which first appeared in 1958, 3 decades before the cause I posit for the mainline/CL community becoming ... not so nice. Note that I don't really know, I left it for Scheme by the middle of the '80s. Is no one writing large bodies of new FORTRAN code? Or is it mostly in COBOL style maintenance mode, and e.g. called a lot by Python, which I gather is getting a lot of attention in the scientific community (I started with IBM 1130 punched card FORTRAN "IV" in 1977 in a academic year long class, but stopped after that, it wasn't an answer for the sorts of problems I was interested in, C and Lisp are).

beat 13y ago
I dunno. I haven't looked at what's going on with FORTRAN in a meaningful way in years. It might largely fall on how algorithms designed to exploit long-obsolete vector processors have been adapted to work on modern, highly parallelized supercomputer networks, with powerful but conventional individual nodes separated by really slow networks.
emkemp 13y ago
Fortran is very heavily used for development in numerical weather prediction. For example, the WRF model (http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users) includes hundreds of thousands of lines of code and has been under continuous development since the late 1990's. And Fortran has evolved significantly in the last two decades, absorbing many features (and lessons learned) from other languages. Structures, modules, encapsulation, argument checking, pointers, allocatable arrays, classes, inheritance, function overloading, pure functions.... Wikipedia has a decent summary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran).