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By: DigitalAxis

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In reply to jack_perry.

This, and it also demonstrates the generational effects of computing… I’m in the sciences and MANY of our programs are written in FORTRAN-77 (and many of the professors only know FORTRAN-77, and possibly RSI IDL) simply because FORTRAN-77 was far and away the most useful language for computational science back when computers became massively available to scientists (much in the way COBOL attracted the business community).

Times have changed and languages have improved, but FORTRAN-77 continues to be used because that’s what people know, and as we’re in a business where your answers matter more than the programming language you used, there’s not much incentive to retrain everyone to use C/C++/Java/Python/IDL/etc. The fact that GCC deprecated its G77 compiler has caused a bit of grief, though… That and I have a hard time because I don’t know FORTRAN-77.


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