Does anyone use fortran

Even if old code is hard to read, poorly documented, and not the most efficient, it is often faster to use old validated code than to write new code. Physicists are not in the business of writing code, after all, they are trying to understand the nature of reality. Researchers usually want to take the path of least resistance. Professors usually have legacy code on hand often code they wrote themselves decades ago and pass this code on to their students.

This saves their students time, and also takes uncertainty out of the debugging process. Fortran 90 and C are very similar, but Fortran is easier to code in for reasons I will discuss. Object oriented coding can be useful, especially with massive software projects, but it takes significantly more time to learn. One has to learn abstract concepts like classes and inheritance. The paradigm of object oriented coding is very different from the procedural paradigm used in Fortran.

Physicists generally have an understanding of how computers work and are inclined to think in terms of physical processes, such as the transfer of data from disk to RAM and from RAM to CPU cache. This is in contrast to mathematicians, who prefer to think in terms of abstract functions and logic.

It is also in contrast to the way one thinks about object oriented code. Optimizing object oriented code seems more difficult to me than procedural code. Arrays can be copied, multiplied by a scalar, or multiplied together quite intuitively as:. Here, A, B, C are arrays, with some dimensions for instance, they all could 10x10x Almost all of the intrinsic functions in Fortran Sin , Exp , Abs , Floor , etc can take arrays as arguments, leading to easy of use and very neat code.

Trying to feed an array into the wrong library function in C will return an error. Having to use libraries instead of intrinsic functions means the resulting code is never as neat, as transferable, or as easy to learn. The following Fortran code shows a few more array features:.

First a vector A is created using an implicit do loop, also called an array constructor. Finally, array B is copied into array C, starting at element Fortran supports declaring arrays with indices that are zero or negative:. Fortran also supports vector-valued indices.

Fortran also incorporates masking of arrays in all intrinsic functions. For instance, if we want to take the log of a matrix on all of the elements where it is greater than zero we use.

Is Fortran faster than C? Fortran semantics say that function arguments never alias and there is an array type, where in C arrays are pointers. This is why Fortran is often faster than C. A language which wants to be faster than C should provide semantics where aliasing can be better analyzed by the compiler.

Is Fortran worth learning? Fortran is a nice language it has to be said, but it's not used a huge amount any more. If you want to get into a niche job, and earn some good money as a specialist then yea it's worth learning, there are still places that use it, but those places WILL be hard to find.

Is Fortran faster than Python? The reason it's being used so much is that it's fast enough for most things and has excellent Fortran powered libraries for many but not all of the things you would like to do. Fortran is a somewhat lower level language. Is Fortran obsolete? So Fortran is not complex and it's not outdated. Fortran users are mostly the real engineers and their number doesn't grow exponentially. So there are basically the same amount of Fortran users, old and young, as it was some 30 or 40 years ago when Fortran was at its peak.

Why is C faster than Python? Python is slower than C because it is an interpreted language. This amplifies the number of actual CPU instructions required in order to perform a given statement. The difference is that the python code will be interpreted, instead of directly by the CPU. Is Fortran free? GNU Fortran, gfortran, is free.

Fortran is the oldest commercial programming language, designed at IBM in the s. And even though, for years, programmers have been predicting its demise, 64 years later it's still kicking, with users including top scientists from NASA and the Department of Energy using it on the world's most powerful supercomputers.

It even recently — and very unexpectedly — popped up again in a ranking of the most popular programming languages, albeit in 20th place. This resurgence has been explained by the huge need for scientific number crunching; something that Fortran is very good at. Where to learn the most popular programming languages Here's a look at the most popular programming languages based on surveys and courses. Read More. But few would argue that Fortran has an especially rosy future ahead right now, as scientists are flocking to newer languages such as Python or Julia.

Many of Certik's projects are written largely in Fortran and he's trying to make Fortran more appealing to developers. I would argue it is dying," Certik tells ZDNet. We still have millions of lines of code in it, so we will still have Fortran code 20 years from now, but for new projects, people don't use Fortran anymore.

His first effort is the LFortran compiler , which will help to translate Fortran code into modern languages, including Python and Julia. The second is the fortran-lang website to give Fortran programmers what Python and Julia developers have — a space for a community to collaborate on improvements.

Fortran itself is still actively developed through two main bodies: the US Fortran standards committee, J3 , which is the primary influencer of standards set by the worldwide Fortran body, WG5. Clune, who is NASA's main representative on the J3 Fortran committee , says the language is snagged on the question of supporting new features that risk breaking old code.

Fortran has undergone several major updates since , including the F and F releases, and another in The next two updates are referred to as FX and FY, but they're years away. It's a tricky balancing act; match modern programming languages and risk breaking things or don't add new features — and risk losing users to newer languages.

And there is absolutely no guarantee that there is a sweet spot in the middle," he admits.