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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

"Early Fortran (designated in allcaps as FORTRAN)" that would be because it is an acronym "FORmula TRANslator".

Fortran continues to do that well. And as the article mentions scipy doesn't run as fast.

The logical successor to Fortran was APL (Arithmetic Programming Language) but its notation really killed it.

The properties that keep Fortran rolling (easy to start using, effective in translating formulas into computation) persist.

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APL is named after Kenneth Iverson's book "A Programming Language".

I'm ignorant about FORTRAN, have there been attempts to modernize it? Maybe something like coffeescript/typescript?

The latest major Fortran version, circa 2003, is at least as modern as something like C++.

I would also like to add that there have been revisions in 2008 and 2015 [1].

[1]: http://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/Fortran+2015

Fortran 2000 and beyond IS a very modern language.

You didn't read the article apparently. Fortran (which officially dropped all caps in the standard in 1990) has had new versions every couple years, up to 2013. Each revision of the language brings modern features into it, and old features go through a process of deprecation and then obsolescence. Most people seem to be unaware that it is an evolving language that has changed significantly since the standard most people are familiar with from 1977. I am a bit biased though: I work on a Fortran compiler, so I've had reason to stay on top of the standards as they come out.

I misread that everything was backwards compatible, my bad.

In the 70s, when Fortran 66 still ruled the night, the usual suspects at Bell Labs wrote Ratfor, which was pretty much what Coffeescript did to Javascript, bending the syntax towards C.

When you compare the current Fortran standards to its '66 version, you'll see how much progress it made.

And I hope that you can actually use it these days. Round the turn of the millennium, it was still quite common for people to use Fortran 77 because that's all that was supported or fit in the general codebase.

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