Reply to: Fortran

[Troll]

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

[darmstadt]

Here you go, budding Fortran progammers:

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

[mudskipper]

Yup.

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

I have fond memories of equivalence.

[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...

[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

[jamesbrown]

Your nugatory "imagination" counts for nothing. There is a contract market for FORTRAN. I have profited from it.

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.

[helpFul]

Imagine there's no FORTRAN

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.

Your nugatory "imagination" counts for nothing. There is a contract market for FORTRAN. I have profited from it.

[helpFul]

The Demand for FORTRAN

Does anyone here use it? Is it still used anywhere?

I used it back in the 1980s, but nobody seems to have mentioned it for years.

FORTRAN was my first language. I first used it from about 1972 to 1984 in academic and, latterly, contract environments.

More recently in 2008 I got a FORTRAN contract with a scientific research establishment.

[Sysman]

Compile COBOL on the Microsoft® .NET

Ooh thanks!

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to mudskipper again.

Will someone do the needful please?

[mudskipper]

If someone would do a similar thing with COBOL that might open up a lot of possibilities for those gazillion lines of legacy code out there.

Compile COBOL on the Microsoft® .NET

[Sysman]

Don't forget Fortran.NET: Lahey - LF Fortran for .NET

If someone would do a similar thing with COBOL that might open up a lot of possibilities for those gazillion lines of legacy code out there.

[NickFitz]

Don't forget Fortran.NET: Lahey - LF Fortran for .NET

[Sysman]

Isn't there a Fortran99? I think some old timers may still be using it, presumably mostly in legacy code.

Intel Fortran Compilers

Intel got DEC's FORTRAN products and development team in the late 90s as part of a settlement for technology they had stolen from DEC. I heard at the time that the Visual FORTRAN product was really quite neat.

and unbelievably, a few die hards are still using Cobol!

There are apparently millions of lines of COBOL still in production use. Think traditional mainframe shops.

USB Switzerland actually moved a load of stuff to a mainframe with COBOL about a decade ago.

[jamesbrown]

Both of which are renowned for the robustness of their models

Precisely, they are. The predictions OTOH.

[stek]

FTFY

It was a PC! The Power Station itself ran on MicroVaxes (and a couple of Alphas!) and some VAXStation 4000's I think - was a long time ago but the PowerStation was on a PC, state of the art Pentium 133's...