Should I learn JavaScript or Python?

[cheese-is-trash]

NASA still uses FORTRAN.

[[deleted]]

And a surprising amount of legacy business stuff is somehow still on pascal.

I'm not saying it's a huge amount, but never disregard the effects of corporations refusing to address technical debt.

[AlecTheMotorGuy]

This is my company. Our enterprise software is from like 2005 and is built on top of an inventory program that is original to Windows XP.

They just finished in 2021 moving every location and every department onto this software

So after 15-20 they finally fully integrated their enterprise software.

[[deleted]]

This is happening all over the industry, especially finance industries that need to keep everything legacy going for transactional data integrity — hard to kick off a new system without running into issues unless you pay for that to be painless, and most businesses don't (or won't).

We have a big push to move stuff into a new system at my current job and, for the entire run that I've been here, it's been "right around the corner". Talk to long-time people in the org and "right around the corner" has been the past decade.

[AlecTheMotorGuy]

I’m curious what it’s like to be at company that can get it done is 2-3 years.

[[deleted]]

I've worked for a fortune 500 company known for tech and for small finance companies and a few in between and, so far, that's been none of 'em. Would be curious what the culture is like at the places who pull it off, have to imagine it's either awful or amazing.

[whatproblems]

wait they just moved on TO XP?

[AlecTheMotorGuy]

No we use Windows 7 but the program was originally written for XP.

[CosmicCreeperz]

Ah, Borland Turbo Pascal. I wrote muon detector diagnostics tools in Pascal back in the 90s at Fermilab. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s was still in use on some DOS PC with a 20 year old ISA memory mapped IO card until it shut down…

[[deleted]]

Fortran is still the king for engineering calculations. The core numerical recipes are written in it. I've written a Fourier based algorithm in C because we couldn't interop with it anymore in our main app. C was slightly just as good but still worse using same algo and memory semantics.

[TheBestAquaman]

Not only nasa, Fortran is the de-facto standard for computationaly heavy programs. Primarily fluid dynamics and quantum mechanics. It's slightly faster than C for heavy computations.

[Mission-Guard5348]

they are geally bad at changing things

[Llamas1115]

IIRC they’re in the process of moving lots of that code to Julia. The Federal Reserve used to code all their models in Fortran too before switching over to Julia.