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Comment by bartlettD | Hacker News Reader

Jim's article pretty much confirms my assumption that Fortran isnt "dead" but is instead more of a de-facto domain-specific language. If you're a meterologist, you'll probably be using Fortran just because all of the existing libraries are built for it.

Unless you're doing scientific computing, Fortran is effectively dead.

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> Unless you're doing scientific computing, Fortran is effectively dead.

Thats kind of like saying,

    unless you are doing systems programming C is effectively dead

Good point, from a certain perspective all programming languages are dead and we're actually historical computer-lingusts.

C is very much also alive in games programming, binary security research, embedded systems, HPC, and as a target language for simple compilers. Oh, and as the lingua franca of all foreign function interfaces. And there's still a thriving vommunity of people writing C purely for fun (e.g. see obfuscated c programming competition).

I think it's completely fair to say that Fortran is dead because only physicists use it. And there is no way to justify any similar statement for C.

I understand that C is far more used than Fortran. Of course I also dont think C is dead. I was trying to make a statement about saying Fortran is just alive in scientific computing. While this is mainly true, scientific computing is so huge that it is quite a big thing to be alive in it.

And no, I don't think only physicists use Fortran. If you really think this then you probably dont quite understand the ecosystem of numerical computing. Besides if only Physicists use Fortran and is otherwise dead, I hardly think, for example, that AMD, Intel, and Nvidia would bother releasing optimizing compilers just for Fortran.

I think a difference here is that for lots of people they can through the stack of things they use and find C. This is less the case for Fortran.

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