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Fortran is not used at most businesses. I doubt Fortran is used much anywhere outside of possibly engineering. Even then Engineers probably use some type of Aut

Fortran is not used at most businesses. I doubt Fortran is used much anywhere outside of possibly engineering. Even then Engineers probably use some type of AutoCad like software that does modelling, and therefore nobody needs to know FOrtran anyway.

bigger_cheese 12y ago
Engineer here. I work at a large industrial plant Fortran is used quite a bit. We have numerical simulation code which runs and feeds back into our operating process written in Fortran (mostly Thermodynamics and Chemical kinetic's simulations). Plant Operators make descions based on the output of Fortran models all without knowing or caring that the things are written in Fortran. You can trace the herritage of the code back to the 80's but it has been more or less constantly maintained since then there is a lot of company IP wrapped up in the code. You certainly don't need to know Fortran to use or understand the models (it's wrapped in a 'modernish' C++ GUI) but the engineers working on improvements to the backend definately need to know Fortran. I suspect there is a lot of reasons for the prevalence of Fortran in Engineering code. Industrial plants tends to operate continously you can't exactly replace all the infrastructure without large downtime. A large part of our plant was built in 1996, so the technology is very much what you'd expect from that era (RS/6000 Unix boxes everywhere in the control system). The Libraies and compilers etc all have to link against that vintage. It's not slated to get upgraded until 2018 and we will probably try to push that as far back as we can. When the upgrade happens I suspect we will be on Wintel (and in another 20 years that will probably be just as outdated). The other reason for Fortran is that Engineering processes tend to be stable. A chemical reaction does not change so once some code is written and it works very low incentive to replace it. At my plant our models were first written in the 80's (when personal computers began to become ubiquitous) by senior engineers in the company - these were guys who grew up in the 70's and were raised on Fortran. Eventually the code was handed to the junior engineers to maintain. The juniors passed up the ranks to become seniors and when it came time to write the next generation of models "I'll base it on this existing Fortran Model which I know inside out and works really well" became the mantra and so Fortran become self perpetuating and entrenched across the industry. If it had been a decade later would probably have been C

bigger_cheese 12y ago

Engineer here. I work at a large industrial plant Fortran is used quite a bit. We have numerical simulation code which runs and feeds back into our operating process written in Fortran (mostly Thermodynamics and Chemical kinetic's simulations). Plant Operators make descions based on the output of Fortran models all without knowing or caring that the things are written in Fortran. You can trace the herritage of the code back to the 80's but it has been more or less constantly maintained since then there is a lot of company IP wrapped up in the code. You certainly don't need to know Fortran to use or understand the models (it's wrapped in a 'modernish' C++ GUI) but the engineers working on improvements to the backend definately need to know Fortran. I suspect there is a lot of reasons for the prevalence of Fortran in Engineering code. Industrial plants tends to operate continously you can't exactly replace all the infrastructure without large downtime. A large part of our plant was built in 1996, so the technology is very much what you'd expect from that era (RS/6000 Unix boxes everywhere in the control system). The Libraies and compilers etc all have to link against that vintage. It's not slated to get upgraded until 2018 and we will probably try to push that as far back as we can. When the upgrade happens I suspect we will be on Wintel (and in another 20 years that will probably be just as outdated). The other reason for Fortran is that Engineering processes tend to be stable. A chemical reaction does not change so once some code is written and it works very low incentive to replace it. At my plant our models were first written in the 80's (when personal computers began to become ubiquitous) by senior engineers in the company - these were guys who grew up in the 70's and were raised on Fortran. Eventually the code was handed to the junior engineers to maintain. The juniors passed up the ranks to become seniors and when it came time to write the next generation of models "I'll base it on this existing Fortran Model which I know inside out and works really well" became the mantra and so Fortran become self perpetuating and entrenched across the industry. If it had been a decade later would probably have been C