Fortran and MAXIMUM PC

[JohnNichols]

In the latest edition of MAXIMUM pc - a mag for following the hardware trends and other info, an author opines that Fortran and COBOL are old languages and it is time for the humane destroyer.

Finding people to speak these languages to maintain these systems is not the way forward -- someone called de Jager..  page 37. 

When I stopped laughing I laughed some more. 

[Greg_T_]

Hi John,

I hope Fortran continues to exist for a very long time.  My engineering work is in structural analysis and its subset fracture mechanics analysis. As a domain specific application of Fortran, both structures  and fracture mechanics rely on finite element analysis (FEA) to get stress and strain values used in our assessments, and of course the FEA programs and the linear algebra solvers they user are written in Fortran.  Our fracture mechanics software is a good example of the language inter-operability using C# or Visual Basic for the GUI, which calls the Fortran routines to do the calculations. Being able to move Fortran source code between operating systems and recompiling easily is another big plus.  Perhaps the author of that article hadn't considered high performance computing (HPC) as a domain application where Fortran is needed?

Regards, Greg T.

[Steve_Lionel]

English is an even older language. Do they think we should stop using it and learn something new?

[JohnNichols]

Lu'       

[JohnNichols]

For those who still speak English that is Klingon for yes. 

Interestingly the Klingon translator has Fortran for Fortran.

A small  tad of humour never hurt anyone.