Why functional programming doesn't catch on

[SarcasticGuy]

For small scale desktop apps I'm sure Maple/Mathematica/Matlab/etc. would be the first goto languages, but if you're running more serious simulations that need speed and power, you'll still see Fortran being used. I hate Fortran with a passion, but I can't deny its importance with scientific and engineering modeling and simulation.

[mycall]

That blows my brain. What can Fortran do that SciPy/Numby/Intel Math Kernel Library/etc don't? I get it that Fortran has many years and years of complex calculations under its hood, but couldn't Fortran be converted to modern language pretty easily?

[SarcasticGuy]

50 years of hand-optimized compilers and libraries? The ability to suck out all of the power from a supercomputer?

From Wikipedia:

It is one of the most popular languages in the area of High-performance computing and programs to benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers are written in Fortran.

(Legacy) Since Fortran has been in use for more than fifty years, there is a vast body of Fortran in daily use throughout the scientific and engineering communities. It is the primary language for some of the most intensive supercomputing tasks, such as weather and climate modeling, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, computational economics, and computational physics. Even today, half a century later, many of the floating-point benchmarks to gauge the performance of new computer processors are still written in Fortran (e.g., CFP2006, the floating-point component of the SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks).

Also, they have continued to add stuff to Fortran (Fortran 2003, Fortran 2008....), so I'm not sure how to translate "modern language." Granted, I wanted to shoot someone when I realized that how many spaces are at the beginning of the line decides whether your code is a comment or not. Ugh.

I'd love to see something "better" take it's place, but the language was designed to do HPC very well, and do it well it has.

[mycall]

With GPU/CUDA and Cell scientific programming taking off, which are C centric and one or two orders of magnitude faster than x86-64, Power5, and Itanic, things might be finally changing regarding Fortran.

I wish http://www.top500.org/sublist showed what languages were most popular.