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Comment by medo-bear | Hacker News Reader

If you do anything related to numerical computations (which is a pretty huge field) learning Fortran wont be a waste of time. If you are doing anything else your time might be better spent elsewhere

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Can I request some more insights about it? If I want to be doing something else, why isn't Fortran a good fit? Lack of extensive stdlib like Python and Go?

Mine was not a statement about its stdlib or if Fortran can do something else well. Great majority of people in Fortran community are focused on numerical methods.

Basically the only "stdlib" that Fortran gives you are some mathematical functions, super basic string and file operations and that's it. There are no APIs for networking, sockets, IPC, threads, etc. that pretty much al modern languages come with.

Can you write a parser in it? Sure, but it's going to be painful dealing with strings. Can you write a web server? Yes, but you'd have to link to a C library that exposes the kernel TCP/IP interface to Fortran. And so, on.

So, essentially it would be like using C without a libc: it's doable, but it doesn't really make sense.

A few of these things exist already: - http: https://github.com/fortran-lang/http-client - sockets: https://github.com/modern-fortran/tcp-client-server - threads: https://github.com/interkosmos/fortran-unix

It's a use the right tool for the job thing. Fortran is very fast, used primarily for scientific computing in various fields - not a lot of people are writing general purpose code in Fortran. Of course you can do it, but it's not a great experience and you'd spend a lot more time doing work you'd rather already have tools for.

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