I know it's just an article, but...
If anyone thinks they should replace working Fortran code that does numerical analysis with Ruby, they should be fired.
The first being that the code works fine, the deployment works fine, everything is working just fine. Do. Not. Touch. It.
These are some of the most financially important systems in America to date. It's not a question about if they have to work, it's a question about just how bad things would get if they didn't work for even a day.
The next problem that comes up is what happens when someone finds a bug 60, 40, or even 10 years in the future? What happens when some of this old hardware breaks and it becomes not only impossible to find replacement parts but also impossible to fabricate new ones in house.
Eventually, like all languages, Fortran will die out as time goes on. So few people know it now that it is inevitable.
Eventually something has to give and we can do two things until then.
1. Wait for time to pass and pretend nothing will ever happen to these machines.
2. Slowly start rewriting all of the stack, and transferring everything to more modern systems designed to be just as long term as their predecessors so that in the event of a replacement being needed it exists.
I don't know about anyone else, but I like to have backups/fallbacks when planning for the future.
I'm not saying that Ruby or any new language should be entrusted with this kind of responsibility. But there needs to be a decision and it needs to be made over the next couple of decades.
"Slowly start rewriting all of the stack, and transferring everything to more modern systems designed to be just as long term as their predecessors so that in the event of a replacement being needed it exists."
There are challenges of course, but thinking the problem is coding infrastructure and the lack of "modern" languages like ruby is a category error.
You must remember that relatively speaking compared to Fortran, C is a "modern" language.
In what way?
Fortran code is certainly not lower level than C and in many cases higher level. Furthermore, they are closer in age, for example, than Smalltalk is to Ruby.
And those where not simply 15 years, they were a very important 15 years of development.
Relatively, C is more modern than Fortran. It is also certainly more widespread.
You get a modern Fortran compiler, you compile the old code for the new stuff and off you go. What am I missing?
> Eventually, like all languages, Fortran will die out as time goes on. So few people know it now that it is inevitable.
Like ALL languages? Ha, tell that to the COBOL programmers at the heart of some financial institutions mate. Heck, RPG is still supported on some IBM hardware.
All languages die out eventually. It does not matter that it is a programming language, the concept will remain.
Nothing is perpetual, nothing lasts forever. I hate to break it to you, but eventually something will give.
Most Fortran programmers I know aren't programmers by trade - they're scientists or analysts who need to crunch numbers. Fortran doesn't need to be as feature complete or cutting edge as more general purpose languages.
I'm in webdev, and while it does have its worrying trends with regards to the larger trade of programming, they are largely insular and contained. Only way to explain this kind of behavior is to have worked your entire career in webdev (with horse blinders on) and have next-to-no understanding of computer science. That, or she doesn't give a shit because Github is paying her a fuck-ton not to.
I'm going to guess in this case, it's the latter.