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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

FORTRAN users beg to differ. The horse they backed will be here until the lights go out because it probably is used to power the lights at some level.

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Yes it most certainly is. All the power system applications written in the 60's and 70's were done so in Fortran as they had to be fast and run numerical analysis on massive matrices. However, a lot of it is being rewritten in more modern languages like C++ or C depending on the application.

> However, a lot of it is being rewritten in more modern languages like C++ or C depending on the application.

And a lot of it is embedding FORTRAN or COBOL in the new pretty C/++.

New skin, same system.

> numerical analysis on massive matrices. However, a lot of it is being rewritten

In Julia, too.

Probably some, but in the industry I'm referring to, nobody is going to let you write a critical system in some new relatively unknown language. Options are Fortran, C, C++, or Java. Julia is cool, but still really new in the cosmic scale.

> nobody is going to let you write a critical system in some new relatively unknown language.

Whose permission do you seek who will "let you" or not "let you" write a critical system in some new relatively unknown language? What if you work for yourself or are creating a startup?

Obviously a startup with no history is a totally different context. The parent commentator did mention "industries". Power in particular (think nuclear power especially!) are... necessarily conservative.

I was surprised to learn that Blackrock uses Julia.

https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/blackrock.html

Ha! I can't say I've ever programmed in Fortran[1], but surely it too will perish... eventually. Idle meta-thought: It's actually kind of interesting how hard it is to replace "legacy" in programming... I wonder if there's something we could/should be doing to make it easier to do on a large scale?

[1] I think it's spelled that way these days, but of course given the context of the thread, maybe you're talking about old-school FORTRAN.

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