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

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#51

Post by kanzure » Sat, May 04, 2013, 8:37 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…

> but wait, he's over 60.

But he didn't say which way the age discrimination works. Are they only taking ancient programmers because "young people can't possibly have any experience on COBOL/Fortran-loving mainframes" or is it the more familiar form of age discrimination?

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#52

Post by rz2k » Sat, May 04, 2013, 8:39 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #9

AdrianRossouw wrote: post #2

I was surprised to see when I installed R for the first time, that a large amount of the libraries it makes use of are written in fortran. To complete the installation required me to choose from one of several current and compatible fortran compilers even. So at least for fortran, the answer is scientific computing.

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

And, also Octave

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#53

Post by notJim » Sat, May 04, 2013, 8:43 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 took a few programming classes in Germany, and they were all taught in Delphi. It seemed to occupy the same place as VB does/did here in the US.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#54

Post by valdiorn » Sat, May 04, 2013, 9:17 PM UTC

I work in a bank and we're currently looking for a new all-encompassing loan and leasing system. The primary candidate, from Sopra, is written in COBOL and runs on an IBM mainframe.

... yup, people buy new COBOL software even today.

PS: I won't have to touch the thing, thank god. I made it pretty clear to my boss I would rather find a new job than to dedicate myself to supporting this monstrosity :)

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#55

Post by na85 » Sat, May 04, 2013, 9:33 PM UTC

dmlorenzetti wrote: post #27

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.).…

In general, I agree with you. However, modern Fortran also has a strong module system, and some nice looping constructs (like explicitly-labeled loops that let you control "breaking" and "continuing" in nested loops quite easily), that made me like using it for even non-array-oriented programs (for other reasons, I don't use Fortran so much anymore). The only thing I absolutely hated about Fortran for parsing data fi…

Yep, I/O in fortran is kind of a pain. I really like the rest of the language, though.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#56

Post by porker » Sat, May 04, 2013, 9:43 PM UTC

nhebb wrote: post #48

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 be a member of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP), and Delphi was popular among small shops making Windows desktop applications. I never was a Delphi programmer, but it's adherents loved that it produced fast code with a small footprint. It combined a RAD environment let developers easily do low level coding when needed. When VB6 was canned by Microsoft, I think Delphi had an opening that they…

I was always impressed by the Delphi Components ecosystem. There seemed to be a lot of useful code available at good prices - something I miss working as a web developer now.

Completely agree witht he product being mis-managed; it's still viable if they'd only make it competitive...

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#57

Post by ScotterC » Sat, May 04, 2013, 9:53 PM UTC

I used to script FORTRAN back when I was in nuclear engineering. I didn't know of Fortran's particular advantages other then that the software we used was built in FORTRAN and all our scripts to date that we used were built in FORTRAN and the general attitude in the uber-safe world of nuclear engineering is if it works, and works well, why in god's name would you mess with it :)

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#58

Post by m_mueller » Sat, May 04, 2013, 10:00 PM UTC

maaku wrote: post #14

m_mueller wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the right tools[1] you can have as much templating/macro support as in C++ while keeping everything both performant and user friendly. The key here is to wrap Fortran in script languages to make it do exactly what you want. [1] https://github.com/muellermichel/Hybrid-Fortran (I'm the maintainer.)

> 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.

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#59

Post by m_mueller » Sat, May 04, 2013, 10:08 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #19

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.).…

why is FORTRAN "terrible for other things" given that it has a lot of useful features for technical programming that more modern languages lack. You could always look at ratfor if you need to do a lot of character based stuff. Back in the day I even wrote billing systems and a device driver for PDP's using fortran.

Fortran's string support is optimized for easily logging or outputting the numbers you've just crunched. For everything else it's just way too clunky, which is CS people tend to move everything not very performance critical into non-Fortran wrappers. I find Python to be particularly well suited for that task. I've also found a nice and simple module to give Fortran executables a unix style CLI[1]. Putting all this together with GPGPU acceleration makes a pretty mean combination for scientific computations.

[1] http://home.comcast.net/~urbanjost/CLONE/KRACKEN/krackenhelp...

Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

#60

Post by yyqux » Sat, May 04, 2013, 10:20 PM UTC

bmuon wrote: post #10

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.).…

I'm not sure by now the language's merits are the number one reason Fortran is used, but rather the amount of proven and super fast libraries for number crunching and array/matrix manipulation such as LAPACK.

It's the only language that has quality, actively-developed compilers, excellent support for multidimensional arrays and can be very effectively optimized. The libraries are a bonus, but support for proper multidimensional arrays (i.e. not arrays of pointers to arrays) in other widely-used high-performance languages it either crippled or non-existent. It's a bit baffling that something better hasn't come along, but I think the wealth of Fortran libraries and amount of work on compiling it would make it hard for a new language to get traction.