Fortran

“There's also fewer traps to fall in than C++ which is elephant sized in scope to Fortran's mouse.”

“‘95 is really the last standard to all be reliably portable across implementations.”

“That is astonishing and I think was not on the radar of computing machinery people in the 50s.”

“It's syntax for mathematical operations is head and shoulders above most more recent languages.”

“best in class in its niche: writing numerical algorithms that compile to highly optimized machine code”

“Fortran was the first “mainstream” (for the time) language to offer anything like this.”

“It's crazy by modern standards; in some cases you have to see as far as the second-last character”

“Fortran is very very good at optimizing array processing due to lack of aliases”

“But the control structures were very limited, everything was basically jumps and gotos.”

“Modern fortran is very very fast and much nicer to use than C for linear algebra”

“There was a lot of terrible stuff in FORTRAN from a software engineering point of view”

“It was useful; preprocessors like Flecs used it to emulate missing control structures.”

“love Fortran as a language but really worried about how it's both the foundation of most core packages”

“FORTRAN, which has good multidimensional numeric arrays, is still often used for number-crunching.”

“Fortran is a terrible language for developing an OS. It doesn't even have pointers.”

“It has C FFI, it can compile to static programs and to dynamic libraries, it has C-like performance”

“that's why I find Fortran still serves them better for numerics than anything that came since”

“the only fully supported higher-than-C level language that can produce HPC applications without fighting a compiler left and right”

“the column-major order of Fortran is more efficient for some linear algebra operations”

“it is more often than not faster to write out a simulation or design in a language I know inside out like fortran”

“for numerical code to be run on a specific hardware, including GPU, it's pretty close to perfect”

“it's built for exactly this usecase, and scientists will still be able to read your code without a CS degree”

“lots about its design feels very old-fashioned to my (not particularly young) eyes”

“scientists can pretty much just write down their equations, follow a few simple rules”

“it is really nice for allowing computational scientists to get, like, 95% of the way there”

“Your code will work unchanged until you try to change compilers or your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language.”

“The syntax is needlessly verbose. I/O is a chore. String manipulation is a pain.”

“This might work if Fortran were portable, or if only one compiler were targeted.”

“I think F77 was a pretty well designed language, given the legacy stuff it had to support.”

“If you want a clean language to use as an entry point into the current state of Fortran, you want Fortran 90”

“Fortran 77 and 90 were portable across compilers, but are now at risk from breaking changes”

“If your problem fits into arrays/matrices/vectors as the only required datastructures, Fortran is a VERY good language.”

“the best features to me are colon array slicing syntax like Python/Numpy and arrays being indexed from 1”

“While I enjoyed the class, I have a funny picture of me kicking the FORTRAN book across my dorm room”

“Multidimensional arrays out of the box, fast loops, native cuda support, trivial build and packaging system, zero version churning”

“It was never exactly my cup of tea, but nearly 40 years out of university it seems Fortran has kinda kept up!”

“FORTRAN was my first language in the 60s and I ENJOYED using it until "better" languages came along.”

“there are some (thinking back to my scientific computing days) that are easier to express in Fortran than Prolog.”

“The advantage of having stuff in C and Fortran is that it can easily be used from other languages”

“Fortran is bootstrappable so I consider it more viable than haskell for real world use”