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I started off as a Fortran monkey as we were doing maths on complex numbers. At the time the compiler was quite old (Fortran 77 in the mid 90s) and wasn't doing too well on optimisation so I think one of the guys was looking at reimplementing in C++. We did play with Matlab but back at that time it just didn't have the speed we required. That quest for speed was what was driving us away from Fortran as well. This was the days of 486s with Weitek math coprocessors and i960s trying everything we could to get the required math speed. We were all over the very first Pentiums as they doubled the 486 math speed.

I then moved to telecoms which is the land of C and for pure speed integer math (floating point registers are often being used for something else like special packet handling interrupt code).

As a web developer I rarely need to do anything which is that computationally intensive. The closest I got recently was when I had to write a script to create video segments for HLS streaming. That can tie up a machine for a few hours depending on how many videos you give it, but it's really just a wrapper around ffmpeg. I wrote it when HLS was new still and there weren't many good pre-built tools around for preparing the files.

I think most of what keeps FORTRAN going is inertia. Tons of legacy code out there in the form of libraries and applications which have been written over the decades. FORTRAN is to scientific computing what COBOL is to the banking and insurance industries.

The last time I had any sort of dealings with FORTRAN was probably about 5 years ago on these forums, when someone was asking for help getting a FORTRAN program to compile. Before that, I had some minor contact with it at Fermilab back in the '90s (most of the stuff I worked on there was C/C++ or assembly though); and when I worked in the financial sector back in the late '80s we had some financial modeling code that was coded in FORTRAN (but I eventually ended up porting all of the legacy FORTRAN code to C since that's what we were calling it from anyway).

As an embedded engineer for many years now, experience says that with many fields:
"Few have it, many don't" and that refers to real talent. This is most absolutely true with PCB layout and coding.

You cannot teach someone to be an artist, you can only teach an artist how to use their tools better. Same with engineering. After all, it really is a creative field.

We have seen many poor engineers over the years, which amazes me that colleges will even graduate them. I guess if you are paying tuition, who cares if they get a degree? It sucks though, as many times the lousy engineers are great people to work with. You just have to let them go or you wind up having to kill yourself to cover their work as well as your own and then everyone is miserable.

just brew it! wrote:

I think most of what keeps FORTRAN going is inertia. Tons of legacy code out there in the form of libraries and applications which have been written over the decades. FORTRAN is to scientific computing what COBOL is to the banking and insurance industries.

I can definitely relate to that. a long while ago i even posted a silly fortran academic problem here on the forum http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=83633&hilit=fortran&start=0