The Climate Models are in Fortran

2blowhards.com

2 pointsthras2 comments

It is my premise that every CS course should re-introduce Fortran!

It is the oldest surviving computer language. Shouldn't evolutionary forces have wiped it out by now? Fortran and Cobol made America a place of successful big Science and Cobol made it great in Finance.

Compare this with to-day's computer languages used for trading on the Stock Exchange, not only they messed trading but they also messed the World's Economic flora and fauna!

Fortran persists because its first compiler has been so influential in compiler optimization research, the language has pretty much first-dips on any new performance improvements, and things that need to be fast are written in Fortran because of that.

The power of convention, it boggles the mind.

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