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Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list

zdnet.com

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Re: Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list

#11

Post by m_mueller »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #7
RoyTyrell wrote: post #2

The article didn't say the reason for Fortran's renewed popularity. Anyone know why? Only thing I can think of is either due to AI/ML or robotic-y needs.

took over a project that calculates the inbreeding-coefficient[1] on a platform for animal breeders. The product is used by breeding organization of endangered livestock (an Alpaca club in Ireland, a horse breeder in Belgium etc etc). My first reaction was WTF who decided on this technology. It was developed with some university professors focusing in veterinary geneology and so weren't aware that this isn't the righ…

if the number crunching requirements are moderate (e.g. can be efficiently done in NumPy OR can be done <1min runtime in cPython interpreter and there are no real time requirements) it certainly is very questionable to go with Fortran. If the above isn't true, e.g. for some heavy physics calculations, Fortran is still a fine choice if you get the right people to maintain it. I'd choose it over C/C++ but would first have another look at Julia (esp. regarding its tooling maturity).

Re: Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list

#12

Post by mindB »

I find TIOBE's ranking to be the least helpful and most volatile of any of the language popularity measurements out there. A couple years ago, the Julia language team did a pretty good deep dive on just why that is.

https://juliacomputing.com/blog/2019/09/tiobe-blog/>

Re: Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list

#13

Post by bachmeier »

RoyTyrell wrote: post #2

The article didn't say the reason for Fortran's renewed popularity. Anyone know why? Only thing I can think of is either due to AI/ML or robotic-y needs.

> Fortran's renewed popularity

There's no way to know if a language is becoming more popular. You can only observe if a measure of language popularity is rising, falling, or staying the same. We're almost certainly observing the "measured" part as opposed to the "actual" part.

Re: Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list

#14

Post by jillesvangurp »

milancurcic wrote: post #8
RoyTyrell wrote: post #2

The article didn't say the reason for Fortran's renewed popularity. Anyone know why? Only thing I can think of is either due to AI/ML or robotic-y needs.

As I understand it, the TIOBE index is calculated based on search engine rankings. What I believe helped Fortran's ranking was our hard work on its web presence [1] (started April 2020), modern tooling [2] (started December 2019), and community building [3] (started May 2020). [1] https://fortran-lang.org/ [2] https://github.com/fortran-lang/ [3] https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/

Right, I was wondering about the methodology. I think the yearly Stackoverflow surveys are a bit more reliable probably in terms of what people actually use.

The latest one does not even include either Fortran or Groovy, both of which allegedly and randomly got a lot more popular according to the article. I don't think either of those things actually happened.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...

Fortran competitor, Julia is included. That might just be bias of the Stackoverflow user base of course. But, I think it's a pretty widely used tool also for Fortran developers. At least there are plenty of questions tagged with that (11K, which is more than Julia's 8K).

There recently was some HN post about Fortran, so I imagine that might have triggered a few searches.

Re: Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list

#15

Post by m463 »

I was surprised to find Fortran has continued to get regular upgrades every 5-10 years.

some interesting ones:

1995: "Initialization of pointers to NULL()"

2003: "Object-oriented programming support: type extension and inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic type allocation, and type-bound procedures, providing complete support for abstract data types"

2008: "Coarray Fortran—a parallel execution model"

2008: "The DO CONCURRENT construct—for loop iterations with no interdependencies"

2018: "Further Interoperability with C"

Re: Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list

#16

Post by enriquto »

RoyTyrell wrote: post #2

The article didn't say the reason for Fortran's renewed popularity. Anyone know why? Only thing I can think of is either due to AI/ML or robotic-y needs.

> The article didn't say the reason for Fortran's renewed popularity. Anyone know why?

As a single data point, I'm more and more drawn towards Fortran lately. I never used it before this year, having done all of my work in various non-Fortran languages, mostly C, C++, Matlab/Octave, lua, python+numpy, and Julia. I'm quite fed-up with limitations with all of these languages, and it seems that Fortran has actually its shit together, at least for purely numerical computation (which is all I do and all I need).

Re: Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list

#17

Post by jamesdhutton »

"Stack Overflow Trends" lets you search for number of questions by tag. I personally think this is a more robust indicator of language popularity than TIOBE's method. Here are the results for Objective C vs Fortran. As you can see, by this definition, Objective C is at least twice as popular as Fortran.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=objective-c%2...

Re: Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list

#19

Post by atemerev »

m463 wrote: post #15

I was surprised to find Fortran has continued to get regular upgrades every 5-10 years. some interesting ones: 1995: "Initialization of pointers to NULL()" 2003: "Object-oriented programming support: type extension and inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic type allocation, and type-bound procedures, providing complete support for abstract data types" 2008: "Coarray Fortran—a parallel execution model" 2008: "The DO CONCU…

If you doing nearly anything in physics, you have to know and use Fortran. (And, in fact, modern Fortran is not a bad language -- it is something like Matlab or Numpy, but much faster).
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