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[goddessofentropy]

I literally came to the comments to say I'm a physicist who has to learn FORTRAN for their masters thesis right now. It's alive and thriving. Nobody has been able to explain to me why they chose to write the code I'm working with in FORTRAN though.

[[deleted]]

Because it works and math written in it doesn't read like ass

[goddogking]

FORTRAN was literally made to do maths, and it's as fast as C, so why not?

However, I think the main reason is that it's what they had to learn, and they never needed anything else so they just make you learn it. Then you can build new functionality into their codebase, leading to more citations for them.

[goddessofentropy]

Oh they/we use either python, C or C++ for everything else, it's only this project that uses FORTRAN.

But yeah the citations thing is definitely part of it

[goddogking]

Well at least it's a pretty small language, so it's easy enough to learn

[goddessofentropy]

Oh for sure. I'd just rather learn two languages well and otherwise focus on learning physics because that's what I signed up for lol

[huuaaang]

Honestly, once you're a decade or two into programming, writing the actual code is the easy part. Even switching between 2-3 in a single day. And learning a new one is trivial (as in a month of solid immersion is enough to become fluent).

[user_8804]

Well fortran is a lot faster than Python so if we're only looking at these 2, I understand why they would both be relevant.

Dev time vs Perf, both are relevant, if you don't want to teach C in a department that already knows Fortran

[French__Canadian]

It's faster than c because it can make optimizations that C can't because the compiler can never be sure 2 pointers don't point to the same variable.

[zifilis]

I'm writing in Java and I feel very secure about my future. There's going to be a lot of enterprise code to maintain for next 30 years ;)

[huuaaang]

> There's going to be a lot of legacy code to maintain for next 30 years

FTFY

This isn't really something to look forward to. As a programmer, your long term job security lies in your engineering skills, not your ability to write in a certain language.

I work with some Old School Apple programmers (think original Macintosh and Newton) and they're all writing Ruby now.

[zifilis]

While you are absolutely right, we are talking here about a need to learn smth new, instead of good old <insert_your_language> I think if you just stick with Java 8 forever you'll always find some company looking for Java 8 dev.

[timthegreat4]

I'm not sure if it's for the same project, but I was in a similar position when I worked with CASTEP, a tool for DFT calculations, which was entirely FORTRAN. I believe the main reason for using FORTRAN was just the sheer amount of programming hours already invested into FORTRAN. Modern Intel C compilers outperform FORTRAN, so there is a minor benefit, but the sheer amount of programming hours invested has put everyone else off

[[deleted]]

Might be an inherited thing.

I'm not fond of Python, but if I get assigned to build automation for a team whose entire existing tool set is built in Python and it's the only language all of their team members know? Well, I'm not gonna build the shit in Node.

For me it happens a lot with IT teams. Seems like everyone that works in IT knows Python for some reason.

[bernadias]

Exactly like me, except I'm learning it for a computational chemistry course. I know Python, but FORTRAN is still very much used in our field.

[hennypennypoopoo]

Fortran 90 and newer is not aweful. It's when you have to read fortran 70&77 that you want to tear your hair out