I love the fedi only more for being the only place I know full of exasperated FORTRAN defenders. How can we insult the original word? Yea, when it was first written we were not yet even born! 🥰
@futurebird What can I say? The first dozen programs I ever wrote were Fortran, and they all worked! [back in 1963, in high school, in a Saturday enrichment class at Columbia, running on a NASA 7090] Of course they were trivial…
@futurebird
I believe that my (now deceased) next door neighbour was involved in the development of FORTRAN or so he told me once. He did not expand on that statement and now can't.
🤷♂️
@futurebird ha, BLAS and LAPACK are written in fortran and almost all linear algebra libraries use them for array operations, e.g. numpy. so there’s a chance several of the programs you use are running fortran, especially anything ML/AI related
Adding to my exasperation, the people who write goto-ridden code to "prove" how bad FORTRAN is. C'mon, people, F77 has been around since 1977, it's in the name.
@futurebird The first code I ever wrote for money was in Fortran. It was on a VAX 11/780 and I initially wrote it in VAX Fortran, which had a lot of nice structured-programming features, then I had to take all that out and backport it to Fortran 77 for portability. (The proprietary stuff was all printed in blue ink in the manual, which made it easier.) But writing it that way probably made for more maintainable code.