Software in Fortran
Quick question for the group: Is it normal to run into primary software written in Fortran?! It's caused nothing but trouble over the last 6 months, and I thought that language was dead and gone....
Obviously I'm not in a position to change it, but I was curious if this was common?
Obviously I'm not in a position to change it, but I was curious if this was common?
Anything is normal depending on where you are.. I've never even run into Fortran code before, but I don't doubt someone out there hasn't moved on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran - First appeared 1957; 68 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL - First appeared 1959; 66 years ago
Both were basically the only game in town for their respective niches (scientific and business) for maybe 40+ years.
Both still are the only game in town for some applications.
That kind of legacy just doesn't go away overnight because some new kid on the block shows up.
Then there's C, which is basically the glue that holds the universe together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL - First appeared 1959; 66 years ago
Both were basically the only game in town for their respective niches (scientific and business) for maybe 40+ years.
Both still are the only game in town for some applications.
That kind of legacy just doesn't go away overnight because some new kid on the block shows up.
Then there's C, which is basically the glue that holds the universe together.
| Is it normal to run into primary software written in Fortran? |
Yes in scientific/engineering where there are vast amounts of Fortran code - although some being replaced by Python. Fortran is still used for new programs and is in active development with the current standard Fortran 2023.
Cobol is still in development with the current standard Cobol 2023. This is my least favourite language because of its verbosity.
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only 10, 15 years back I was working with "visual fortran" which was a 3rd party tool that did pretty much what visual studio does, but with fortran. Programs and UI written in that may still be alive, probably are somewhere.
Its far from dead. But its an easy language; you can probably learn most of what you need to know about it in less than a month. We interfaced from that tool into a DLL that our C++ could call, and it was fine, just had to transpose all the matrix stuff.
Every unix comes with fortran compiler for a reason. Some engineering schools still teach it, but many have moved on to more modern languages.
Does the code you have not work, or is it some other problem? Ugly as the language is, it does work if you code the problem right.
Its far from dead. But its an easy language; you can probably learn most of what you need to know about it in less than a month. We interfaced from that tool into a DLL that our C++ could call, and it was fine, just had to transpose all the matrix stuff.
Every unix comes with fortran compiler for a reason. Some engineering schools still teach it, but many have moved on to more modern languages.
Does the code you have not work, or is it some other problem? Ugly as the language is, it does work if you code the problem right.
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For context it's all EHR software (Healthcare yayyyy) so it's vendor supported. Having put in my thousandths support ticket in with said vendor after working with them less than 6 months I've been starting to get a little annoyed and was wondering if the problem was the vendor using an ancient language or just plain old probable incompetence.
Starting to lean towards the latter since it's still a supported language.
Starting to lean towards the latter since it's still a supported language.
The problems are not that the vendor is using an ancient language. There were great programs coded in Fortran 66, Fortran 77 etc way back......
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