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OriginalGriff wrote: If there wasn't, that wouldn't exist!
Yeah, that's interesting.
OriginalGriff wrote: it wouldn't be my first-choice language any more.
That's exactly what I was thinking too. Not sure why it would be something someone would choose to begin a project with. I mean, in many ways this language is tied to older systems right? Unless you're running those older systems you probably aren't going to choose it, I would think.
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FORTRAN is still popular in numerical computing. LAPACK is probably one of best known FORTRAN libraries that is still in active development. I understand that it is also a good fit for parallel computing with implementations for OpenMP and MPI.
Not everything that's old is necessarily bad (see wine); not everything that's old is necessarily obsolete (see self)  .
Mircea
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: Not everything that's old is necessarily bad (see wine); not everything that's old is necessarily obsolete (see self)
I agree. A lot of the old things are actually the best (various works of art, etc).
There must be a market out there somewhere. Just wondering how large it is and who is doing Fortran work. 
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Meteorologists.
My daughter started college back in 2006 to be a meteorologist. I went with her to her advisor's office when she signed up for her 1st semester classes. While there I saw several Fortran programming books on his bookshelf. At the end of the meeting I asked about them. He said all the major meteorological models are written in Fortran so if you're going to play with the models you're going to play in Fortran. I would have thought that they would have been modernized as time went on, but he said they are so huge and complex with so many assumptions coded into them that the task of updating/rewriting is so daunting it never gets past the proposal stage.
Unless, of course, things have changed in the last 15 years.
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Very interesting, thanks for sharing.
FreedMalloc wrote: but he said they are so huge and complex with so many assumptions coded into them that the task of updating/rewriting is so daunting it never gets past the proposal stage.
This strikes me in two (opposite) ways at the same time:
1. If it ain't broke, don't fix it
2. I wonder if there might be new weather science and better algorithms that might create better models than in the past?
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Fortran is still being updated (the most recent ISO Standard dates from 2018). Given that participation in the Standard bodies is voluntary, I doubt anyone would waste much time on a "fossil language". The kind of people with the knowledge and experience to set standards are usually busy people, after all.
Having said that, I doubt that Fortran has anywhere near the same market share that it did in the late '50s.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: I doubt that Fortran has anywhere near the same market share that it did in the late '50s
Which may explain why some people have plenty of time to sit on standards committees ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: Having said that, I doubt that Fortran has anywhere near the same market share that it did in the late '50s.
Definitely agree. That's why I'm wondering if there is anyone out there (in CP-land) who is using it. Also, I wonder how old they are.  Because I'm old and I've never even used Fortran.
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Probably depends on your definition of old: I'm 64 and in the '70-es when I learned programming, FORTRAN was the first thing I ran into. Could have been worse and turned to COBOL (the dark side of programming) .
Haven't used it for 3 or 4 decades but I still have a compiler sitting somewhere on my drives. Not too long ago had to re-implement a FORTRAN in C++ so a passing familiarity with the language was useful.
Mircea
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raddevus wrote: it's difficult enough to get "these kids" to learn a language with a compiler, let alone one where they need an AS/400 Mainframe installed in their basement.
No need for an AS/400 (or for your very own electrical substation ). Silverfrost Fortran FTN95 is free for personal use, and runs on a personal computer.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: No need for an AS/400 (or for your very own electrical substation )
Wasn't that some CP guy a while ago telling that the first version of the DEC Alpha microprocessor required a three phase power supply? Maybe that was a prototype, before the commercial release of the microprocessor. Nevertheless: When we got our first Alpha (and we never got a second...), it was commonly known that if you wanted fried eggs for lunch, you could make them on top of the Alpha.
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Why mess with an AS/400? GO with the machine I used Fortran on - an IBM 370/158 with 2 attached processors. Then you won't need to worry about heating the house, or possibly even the entire block, in the winter! We heated approximately half of a large hospital with one when the boilers had to have emergency repair work done one winter. Of course, you're going to need some very large AC units in the summer.
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Nowadays, we call it "the cloud". If your community has got a few megawatts of electricity to spare, inviting some cloudy provider to establish a cloudy computing center in your community.
(The cloud provider will of course tell you that if he can only get the electric power super cheap, it will generate lots of jobs. What he will not tell you is that 90% of the jobs will come as remote management, far away from your community, and the remaining 10% are highly specialized professionals not available locally; they must come in from the outside. If you are lucky, they will employ a cleaning lady from your local community.)
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I was the other way round: at Uni they taught us COBOL first, then FORTRAN.
The COBOL I tried desperately to forget, and loved FORTRAN until I met Assembler and later C.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I'm 56. The last time I used it professionally was about 25 years ago. It's still used in the scientific computing world, where it has some advantages.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: I'm 56. The last time I used it professionally was about 25 years ago.
You're very young to have used Fortran.
I'm 53, but never had the opportunity to use it, but did learn COBOL...Ugh!
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What I had heard sometime back was that the companies making Finite Element Method (FEM) software (used in Mechanical, Civil, Aerospace applications) heavily use Fortran. The Matrix manipulation libraries used there are highly optimized Fortran routines, which they would not want to rewrite in another language, and work on achieving the same levels of speed.
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Amarnath S wrote: highly optimized Fortran routines, which they would not want to rewrite in another language, and work on achieving the same levels of speed.
That makes sense. Must be a very small market though and interesting that the publisher is targeting people like those devs who might buy this book.
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That fits in with something lurking in the back of my mind about my first computer language:
FORTRAN's Mathematical Libraries are the best. That is, after all, it's purpose in life.
"Back in day" I used it to do simulations and instrument automation (things came with, amongst other things, FORTRAN libraries). When I moved on to 'C', it was because MS QuickC came with a graphics library whilst my FORTRAN relied upon assembly functions I had to make myself.
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Ahhh! I used to love QuickC (I still have it installed on this Win10 machine, though I haven't used it for years.
And then came QuickC for Windows, and DOS started to take a back seat in my life. Then the mighty (as in you needed serious arms to carry it) Visual C++ it grew into, which become Visual Studio (and Angels trumpeted it's arrival)
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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At supercomputer centers, Fortran still has a strong position.
I talked with one guy working at a the local computer center, maybe 3 or 4 years ago; he told that Fortran was their standard language for "everything". This could have changed somewhat today, but a language that has been dominating in some field (like supercomputing) for a couple decennies won't go away overnight.
Then comes the question of which Fortran ... Long ago, when proposals for extensions to become Fortran-77 where discussed, one of the great gurus (Dijkstra?) dryly remarked, "I have no idea about what programming languages will look like in year 2000, but I know for sure that they will be called Fortran". When I stumbled over the Fortran 2003 standard, I immediately saw that he had hit the nail on the head, some 25 years earlier. After 2003, it has become more and more true.
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trønderen wrote: At supercomputer centers, Fortran still has a strong position.
trønderen wrote: (Dijkstra?) dryly remarked, "I have no idea about what programming languages will look like in year 2000, but I know for sure that they will be called Fortran".
Yeah, that is very interesting.
I mean C is never going away either, but I like C so... 
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I believe the nuclear weapons simulation programs at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory are written in FORTRAN.
No, FORTRAN is NOT going away. Ever.
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It's just interesting because it's difficult enough to get "these kids" to learn a language with a compiler, let alone one where they need an AS/400 Mainframe installed in their basement.