121–130 of 255 posts
I honestly am not too sure why there is so much derision regarding Fortran (ageism?). A lot of people don't seem to realize the importance this language still has in scientific computing.
Although, I don't guess it's any worse than wanting to use your client-side scripting language for your server, or you database query language.
Google has this thing called “Testing on the Toilet” where they post factoids about Google’s codebase and best practices. I read one and it said FORTRAN is a highly secure language (or there haven’t been any security vulnerabilities found in the language in a while). Devil’s advocate for not writing FORTRAN off completely at first sight.
Why do they even do it in the first place?
Captive audience.
Fortran actually isn't a static language. It's evolved over time. The last significant revision according to wikipedia is just over a year old. The beauty and horror of it probably depends which era of it you're looking at.
IIRC, most people who use Fortran use it because there are extremely specialized physics libraries (or astronomy, or chemistry, and so on) that were probably written three to four decades ago by an extremely intelligent PhD student who lacks a proper programming background. Which suggests that the biggest source of horror would be that most code you'll come across was written by a non-programmer who is intelligent en…
It's definitely not a dead language – a new Fortran front-end has recently been accepted into the LLVM project, joining Clang. So LLVM's only in-tree supported languages (excluding the various IRs) will be C, C++, Objective-C, and Fortran. It had been scheduled for merge into the LLVM monorepo 2 days ago, but has been delayed pending some additional architecture review.
I don't know if Fortran would be considered dead by the "no longer adapting" definition, but that it's still in use isn't proof it's alive.
Ah, Fortran, how I miss you. Unfortunately it seems like the last commit to this project is from three years ago.
I think you meant to say 1. Zero open issues :o 2. Code is stable - no recent fixes :P 3. Not even the mighty spectre and meltdown demanded a fix PS: I am sure this is meant as a parody to make fun of other frameworks.