Fortran Forever

in code on 2014-05-08 14:58 (#3K5)

ArsTechnica has an interesting article featured today about scientific computing and the enduring role played by the Fortran programming language . The article explores three potential challengers to the dominance of Fortran in scientific computing including Haskell , Clojure , and Julia . One of the main points made by the article is that support for existing Fortran and C libraries is essential as is support for concurrent (parallel) algorithms. Will Fortran rule scientific computing forever or will a challenger usurp the throne?

[edited 2014-05-09 13:32 for spelling]

Re: Fortran lives! (Score: 2, Funny)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-08 16:43 (#1G4)

Fortran 77 is certainly what I think of. I only ever learned two programming languages (Commodore 64 BASIC doesn't count): Pascal and Fortran 77. And at the time I thought Fortran was pretty damned cool. Those two were enough to show me I didn't have the right disposition (or intellect) to be a programmer, and I took another career path. But I do have a bit of nostalgia for that old language. I even remember writing my programs out on graph paper to make sure I had things in the right columns. What was that old deal where any characters beyond column 77 wouldn't be regarded as anything but a comment, or something like that? Fun times in 1991.