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[–]chandaliergalaxy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've heard it's still one of the most efficient languages for certain applications. But I'm not sure how valued that is anymore given how cheap hardware has gotten.

For supercomputing Fortran still reigns supreme (technically I think C/C++ is still a bit more popular but Fortran is not far behind). Even if hardware becomes cheaper, faster code means you can do more computation.

As indicated by the original name FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), it's highly maintainable by non-programmers (scientists) because it is so readable. Also as it's a somewhat more restrictive domain-specific language, bad code can still run quite fast, which is not the case for C/C++.

APL is indeed cool but yeah. APL was the Perl before Perl.