What are Fortran and Cobol used for today? • Hacker News Board

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#61

Post by vorg » Sat, May 04, 2013, 10:38 PM UTC

ArtB wrote: post #29

Ovid wrote: post #22

As an ex-COBOL programmer, I did some research in this area and I uncovered the following (from a 2009 blog post of mine). -- Do a little research into COBOL and a few interesting things jump out at you. Some of this information is from Gartner Group and the rest can easily be verified by doing even a brief survey of the field. Taking the following bits of information: * 75% of the world's business data passes throug…

> * People are still writing COBOL constantly, but usually on existing systems. From what I've seen (somewhat limited honestly) it's less "writing" and more like "patching". Minimal maintenance features like adjusting tax rates, accepting 4 digit years, updating country names etc. I wouldn't even call them minor features enhancements, more like routine maintenance.

> COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated 5 billion lines of new code annually

Yeah, almost all of those 5 billion new lines are first copied from those existing 200 billion, then patched.

My last job had a big system where they wanted to enable a new country to be processed. The IT staff started to analyze how to modify it, but an executive for the user department gave the order: "Copy the entire codebase of the existing system, add XYZ- to all the program names, then make the changes". No-one dared disobey. Happily the existing codebase wasn't impacted, but there was now twice as much maintenance, operations, and standby support to do. I'm guessing that executive's gone now, and maybe the systems are now being supported overseas.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#62

Post by sampo » Sat, May 04, 2013, 10:47 PM UTC

unfamiliar wrote: post #20

I use Fortran every day for fluid dynamics research. Fortran is the abusive partner you keep going back to. If C had array operations and aliasing restrictions I would switch in a heartbeat. As it is the syntax "a=b" is a lot better than four nested for loops and hence 4 opportunities to fuck up the indices.

C99 added the `restrict` keyword http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrict

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#63

Post by sampo » Sat, May 04, 2013, 10:49 PM UTC

aydoubleyou wrote: post #34

I have a friend studying meteorology who is learning Fortran. I believe it is still heavily used for weather systems.

I would guess all climate models and weather prediction models are in Fortran.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#64

Post by teamonkey » Sat, May 04, 2013, 11:01 PM UTC

noahl wrote: post #5

I believe we should think of Fortran as a domain-specific language for handling multidimensional arrays, rather than a normal programming language. It might be terrible for other things, but it's great for array computations, and that's what people use it for in big simulations. Since it has a well-defined C FFI nowadays, it's easy to connect it to other languages that can do other things (parsing data files, etc.).…

The fancy array stuff (which honestly isn't anything particularly special these days) was added in F90. I can assure you that there's still F77 code being actively used in the scientific community.

When I was at uni (10 years ago) I worked with libraries written in FORTRAN 4. Those that used F77 were ported only because it was necessary for use with the HP-FORTRAN compiler. The only F90 code in the department was my own.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#65

Post by maaku » Sat, May 04, 2013, 11:13 PM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #58

maaku wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while keeping everything both performant Good luck beating the performance of a Fortran optimizing compiler.

I don't really get your post. I never said that I want to 'beat' the performance of x86 Fortran. This particular framework is designed to make Fortran GPGPU compatible while not loosing any CPU performance. It was used to speed up the next generation Japanese weather physics by 3.5x (compared to six core Westmere) doing exactly that.

My apologies, I misread your post.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#66

Post by vorg » Sat, May 04, 2013, 11:19 PM UTC

winestock wrote: post #44

Ovid wrote: post #22

As an ex-COBOL programmer, I did some research in this area and I uncovered the following (from a 2009 blog post of mine). -- Do a little research into COBOL and a few interesting things jump out at you. Some of this information is from Gartner Group and the rest can easily be verified by doing even a brief survey of the field. Taking the following bits of information: * 75% of the world's business data passes throug…

>Older programmers are sometimes being enticed out of retirement to maintain legacy systems (this is rather hit or miss as there appears to still be some age discrimination here). Dear Lord. The one area where age discrimination should rationally favor older programmers and they still get the shaft. How does that conversation go in HR? "Here's a candidate who knows COBOL... but wait, he's over 60. Ewww, it's so depre…

> The one area where age discrimination should rationally favor older programmers and they still get the shaft.

The reason older workers are employed only grudgingly for vacant Cobol jobs is most of those jobs require after-hours standby support that older people generally don't want to do. Not wanting to be woken up at 3:00am anymore was why I left my last job doing such stuff. Younger workers are less likely to get a doctor's certificate saying they're no longer able to do standby work, soon after they're employed.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#67

Post by mh- » Sat, May 04, 2013, 11:26 PM UTC

derleth wrote: post #30

jrabone wrote: post #11

Scaring baby programmers. Oh, and lots of scientific computing is done in Fortran - eg. the sorts of work my brother does on atomic structure as a computational chemist at ITU, running on grid or supercomputers. On the flip side, there's lots of very large, poorly documented programs which are effectively "mission critical" Fortran. Until someone ponies up a LOT of money to re-write and revalidate them, Fortran ain't…

And the main use of Python is scaring fogey programmers?

Python's main utility is finding who amongst your coworkers is incapable of giving attention to whitespace.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#68

Post by mh- » Sat, May 04, 2013, 11:29 PM UTC

ygra wrote: post #38

jakejake wrote: post #32

I'm kinda blown away that this question hasn't been closed on stack overflow already. The mods are usually so aggressive about discussion-type questions.

(nota bene: I supplied the accepted answer) This isn't a discussion-type topic. It's a question that has a non-subjective answer that doesn't depend on one's opinion. That being said, it might be migrated to programmers.SE and now that the question made it to HN the mods might notice it and actually do so, but I hope they won't.

> protected by Pascal Cuoq 2 hours ago

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#69

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sat, May 04, 2013, 11:31 PM UTC

username111 wrote: post #40

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, mostly because they are the same libraries that R uses. I really feel like I may need to learn Fortran at some point, given its ridiculously good numerical capabilities.

Even matlab uses those libraries ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK )

I actually think that LAPACK will outlive us all, as I can't see anyone ever rewriting (and re-testing) the software that essentially runs science (and a large proportion of "Big Data" approaches).

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#70

Post by mindcrime » Sun, May 05, 2013, 12:51 AM UTC

winestock wrote: post #44

Ovid wrote: post #22

As an ex-COBOL programmer, I did some research in this area and I uncovered the following (from a 2009 blog post of mine). -- Do a little research into COBOL and a few interesting things jump out at you. Some of this information is from Gartner Group and the rest can easily be verified by doing even a brief survey of the field. Taking the following bits of information: * 75% of the world's business data passes throug…

>Older programmers are sometimes being enticed out of retirement to maintain legacy systems (this is rather hit or miss as there appears to still be some age discrimination here). Dear Lord. The one area where age discrimination should rationally favor older programmers and they still get the shaft. How does that conversation go in HR? "Here's a candidate who knows COBOL... but wait, he's over 60. Ewww, it's so depre…

Perhaps I've been channeling Michael O. Church a bit too much for my own good, but sometimes it looks as though he's nailed it.

I'm a big fan of MOC's stuff as well, but just to give you one different datapoint... I'm pushing 40 (will be 40 in July) and I haven't seen any evidence of age discrimination yet. I did get laid off from a programming job about 2 years ago, but, to be quite honest, I had mentally "checked out" a good year or so before along with about half of the other stuff, most of whom left voluntarily or also got laid off. It was a shit job with shit management, and we all groused about it and start making it clear to management that we felt that way, so no big surprise there. OTOH, I had a new job lined up within Now, working in a slightly different role as a traveling consultant type, as opposed to a "sit in the same office day after day after day working on the same product" I find that my age sometimes actually helps. I've been sent to help some of the younger consultants because, as my boss put it, the customer "wants to see somebody with some grey in their beard". And, unfortunately, a little bit of grey is starting to show in my beard. :-(

Anyway, it's just one bit of anecdotal evidence, and I don't mean to claim that age discrimination doesn't happen. But it's definitely not universal. At least in the Raleigh / Durham, NC area.