I see this type of comment often when Fortran is mentioned, and it puzzles me. What are computers for? Mainly for games and websites, with scientific computation an obscure niche? I don’t think so. Computers are for modeling the climate, predicting the weather, simulating the economy, calculating the merger of galaxies, and designing airplanes. For any of these, the high-performing languages are Fortran, Julia, C, and C++. That’s it. Lisp, Erlang, and Smalltalk are wonderful languages, but not for this.

Not really. But if you’re doing scientific computation it’s still a really good language.

You shouldn't -- it's decades old. Use Fortran, which is how it's written now (though your conforming FORTRAN77 will doubtless still compile).

When I do Astro app I found that you want accurate calculation you need fortran. Science spill over to other areas. In fact if you check around many languages and libraries use fortran for say matrix and many other manipulation. You use matrix nearly everywhere.

Btw, My first lecture in 1979 on computer science the lecturer asked exactly this question. What is the use? Why Fortean not dead by now? Why should anyone learn fortran … ba la ba la.

No chance but I wish he had taught me lisp and c instead of Basic … even if not fortran.

It hasn’t been FORTRAN for about 30 years now.

Fortean is still very popular in the scientific community for numeric processing. For example, many nuclear simulations run on fortran.