Hey guys I was wondering if Fortran or any old language would be useful to learn for applications being used today?
Talked to a guy at the employment office that used to code in Fortran this year. The impression that I got is it is a useful bookend on a rather dusty shelf. I have no doubt that many legacy systems out there use it.
http://www.moreisdifferent.com/2015/07/16/why-physicsts-still-use-fortran/
low level languages are still pretty active just in areas where they want/need to optimize as hard as possible to get max performance, so mostly lower level software(drivers kernels services etc) hpc, simulations/number crunching etc.
I am surprised they wouldn't just use C.
well if it works faster for the specific thing they need to do :p
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In engineering it's still used for computational stuff since it's close to the metal for maths. When you are developing and running finite element analysis programs that will simulation very dynamic and complex systems you can save hundreds of hours of computational time.
A lot of code exists already that is very solid and so there is no need to abandon, additionally fortran, in the 2003 version anyway, has gotten modern-ish.
I worked in an offshore and coastal engineering software development office for a while a few years ago, programs they were selling were fortran programs and c# front end. Work well.
To be honest if you were starting fresh from similar stuff you probably would not use fortran of course, but you could.
So in other words its well established so dont fix whats not broke but if tomorrow we wanted to build it all up again we could use C , C++, Rust to get similar performance?
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Basically, yeah. I mean in my small experience what I was working on there was literally 3 decades of code, most of which had become very refined over the years.
Now to be fair sometimes you need to go back and rewrite the fortran 77 stuff to remove the goto spaghetti code and rewind type archaic functions, etc. Overall don't spend the man hours, you are there to make money.
It was my first language though, closely followed by c++, I found it a good start to the concepts. Prob just emotional though as realistically there are better starting points haha
Eleven months later is a necro. Thread is locked.
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