Fortran

[NickFitz]

The vast majority of coding is done by the scientists themselves (including scientific contractors like me), not by IT contractors. So, unless you're a scientist, your "market" is niche to put it mildly.

Late last century I was in Cheltenham for a year or so. One evening I overheard a regular in my local talking about programming stuff and got chatting to him. Turned out he had a load of library code he'd developed over the years in Fortran. He'd got it compiling to a DLL in Microsoft Fortran and wanted to put a Windows UI on it, just for his own work - he wasn't planning on making it available other than to a few people he worked with. He'd had suggestions that either Visual Basic or Delphi would serve his needs; he had plenty of past experience of Pascal so, when I explained that Delphi was basically an IDE and UI library for Object Pascal, itself descended from Turbo Pascal, he was delighted and decided to use Delphi.

It was only later that I realised that somebody in Cheltenham who had developed a large library of Fortran code for analysing LF radio signals could only really be working in one place. And that is how, thanks to my free advice over a pint, GCHQ ended up having to support two dead languages for the price of one

[darmstadt]

Yes, it's still widely used in scientific computing and engineering, particularly for tasks that require supercomputers (weather and climate modelling etc.). No contract market, I would imagine.

There are 2 places within walking distance of my front room that use a fair bit of Fortran. I might still have some lying around from when I worked at one of them:



Still use COBOL which has changed a heck of a lot over the years...

[mudskipper]

Yup.

And all the interesting features, such as EQUIVALENCE, have been taken out.

I have fond memories of equivalence.

[darmstadt]

Here you go, budding Fortran progammers:

Tech Skills That Will Net You $100,000 - Business Insider

[Troll]

Fook..it's becoming a geek and slippers convention