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

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#31

Post by coolsunglasses » Sat, May 04, 2013, 6:00 PM UTC

dmlorenzetti wrote: post #26

gngeal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Any objective reason?

One thing that for years made Fortran stand out is that the language explicitly assumes all arrays passed in to a subprogram have no overlaps. Thus a Fortran compiler doesn't have to do anything special to make sure it preserves order when storing and accessing from two different arrays. Therefore the compiler can be much more aggressive about unrolling loops and changing the order of operations. By contrast, given a…

That's a compiler flag in C and has been for ages. :\

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#32

Post by jakejake » Sat, May 04, 2013, 6:14 PM UTC

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.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#33

Post by hawkw » Sat, May 04, 2013, 6:15 PM UTC

Physicists, or at least the ones I know, tend to use FORTRAN almost exclusively.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#34

Post by aydoubleyou » Sat, May 04, 2013, 6:18 PM UTC

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

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#35

Post by SatvikBeri » Sat, May 04, 2013, 6:36 PM UTC

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…

You come up with a strategy to allow COBOL systems to naturally migrate to a new language and you stand to make millions of dollars.

I'd say that's an underestimate. You can make huge sums simply by knowing COBOL + having financial expertise. If you can actually migrate COBOL systems in a natural way that's likely a multi-billion dollar problem at this point.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#36

Post by ck2 » Sat, May 04, 2013, 6:41 PM UTC

Where is the Pascal love?

Is it dead and buried at this point?

I threw out the box to Turbo Pascal only a decade ago.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#37

Post by philwelch » Sat, May 04, 2013, 6:49 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #36

Where is the Pascal love? Is it dead and buried at this point? I threw out the box to Turbo Pascal only a decade ago.

I used to work someplace that used a lot of Delphi, but they made the top-down decision to standardize on C#.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#38

Post by ygra » Sat, May 04, 2013, 7:00 PM UTC

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.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#39

Post by speg » Sat, May 04, 2013, 7:02 PM UTC

hawkw wrote: post #33

Physicists, or at least the ones I know, tend to use FORTRAN almost exclusively.

I was a physics major for most of my undergrad and I can confirm this.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#40

Post by username111 » Sat, May 04, 2013, 7:09 PM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #18

chimeracoder wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of NumPy/SciPy (Python's scientific computation libraries) are written in Fortran too: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/user/install.html

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 )