[Manipulate]

I made a comment on this earlier and it got me wondering. Does anyone use fortran in their day to day life? For work? Im interested because I have heard that it has all the functionality of C# and more. I am finding this hard to believe however.

[Raynes]

Fortran is the oldest programming language that is still in use today, followed by Lisp. I'm fairly certain it lacks functionality that C# has. Fortran is turing complete, which means it can make a computer do anything that any other language can make it do. The process required to get to that point is a whole different ball game.

So, while the same things may be possible in both languages, I bet it's going to be easier and faster to get there in C#.

This post has been edited by Raynes: 07 August 2010 - 08:52 AM

[macosxnerd101]

Moved to the Corner Cubicle.

[Manipulate]

That is what I was thinking. I guess I was somehow hoping that someone would be like "are you kidding? you can do all kinds of stuff in fortran". Then that person would proceed to demonstrate. But I guess not.

[WolfCoder]

I just stick to C myself. I've been meaning to learn C# just so I know how to use it. I actually use C and JAVA most often in things I do.

[Manipulate]

I would like it much more if my job let me do that. But in the world of engineering and science, its unix and fortran ftw. I do my own stuff in c++ and java though (im a true ooc at heart).

[Raynes]

http://ooc-lang.org/ ;p

[Manipulate]

Hmmm..I mean object oriented coder....Not out of class

[SpeedisaVirus]

Fortran isn't likely to take over programmer space again but I've known people to still use it in scientific computing. Seems more or less fit for that task from what I have seen of it but I'm no fortran programmer...

[WolfCoder]

One of my professors who works at the nearby labs likes to remind me how they use JAVA all the time for scientific work.

[cfoley]

One of my friends programs in Fortran. He's a hydrogeologist and there is a huge fortran codebase. It would cost a fortune in both time, money and training to rewrite it in a more modern language. As a result of his familiarity with it, he writes a lot of new software in Fortran too.

I bet there are loads of niche fields like that that have become stuck with an old language for exactly this reason.

[Manipulate]

cfoley, on 09 August 2010 - 09:28 AM, said:

I bet there are loads of niche fields like that that have become stuck with an old language for exactly this reason.

On the money here. The same code bases exist for most computational sciences (physics, chem, engineering, etc). It really is a bummer though because fortran isnt much fun lol.

[dorknexus]

I've heard a lot of scientific projects starting to use Python and the SciPy libraries. Mostly, I've heard good things. A project I worked on at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory relied heavily on SciPy.

It really shouldn't be that surprising that older languages are just as powerful as C#. LISP pretty much invented everything C# does that all the C# developers think is revolutionary and new. LISP has been around since 1958 so you find a lot of LISP developers looking at the C# feature lists and saying "yeah we've been doing that for 40+ years, welcome to the future."

This post has been edited by Dark_Nexus: 09 August 2010 - 10:58 AM

[Raynes]

You raise a good point. It actually seems like recent revisions added a ton of stuff to Fortran.

[Manipulate]

Yeah, fortran 90/95 is quite feature full, but I still wouldn't put it on par with something like c++. But that may very well be because Im not as experience with it too.