"So we have two legacy languages in the TIOBE Top 20 for rather different reasons - COBOL skills are still needed to sustain vital legacy (or should that be out-dated) systems. Fortran, on the other hand, has a role to play at the cutting edge of scientific research and can be expected to have an expanding role in its "Modern" incarnation."
A weird thing about being 50 is that there are programming languages that I've used regularly for longer than some of the software developers I work with have been alive. I first wrote BASIC code in the 1980s. The first time I wrote an expression evaluator--a fairly standard programming puzzle or homework--was in 1990. I wrote it in Pascal for an undergraduate homework assignment. I first wrote perl in the early 1990s, when it was still perl 4.036 (5.38.2 now). I first wrote java in 1995-ish, when it was still java 1.0 (1.21 now). I first wrote scala, which I still use for most things today, in 2013-ish, when it was still scala 2.8 (3.4.0 now). At various times I've been "fluent" in 8086 assembly, BASIC, C, Pascal, perl, python, java, scala; and passable in LISP/Scheme, Prolog, old school Mathematica, (early days) Objective C, matlab/octave, and R. I've written a few lines of Fortran and more than a few lines of COBOL that I ran in a production system once. I could probably write a bit of Haskell if pressed but for some reason I really dislike its syntax so I've never been enthusiastic about learning it well. I've experimented with Clean, Flix, Curry, Unison, Factor, and Joy and learned bits and pieces of each of those. I'm trying to decide whether I should try learning Idris, Agda, and/or Lean. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few languages. Bit of 6502 assembly long ago. Bit of Unix/Linux shell scripting languages (old enough to have lived and breathed tcsh before switching to bash; I use fish now mostly).
When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.
I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.
I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:
February's TIOBE index has #Fortran as the 11th most popular language, marking its 12th consecutive month in the top 20, beating languages like #Rust, #R, #MATLAB and #Julia. About time to do away with that "Fortran is ancient/dead/obsolete" myth?
#FORTRAN and #COBOL are dead.
Long live Fortran and Cobol.
Modern Fortran is indispensable for high-performance, scientific computing, like weather simulation on supercomputers. Modern Cobol is indispensable for high-throughput, business computing, like financial transaction processing on mainframes.
But Fortran and Cobol suffer from the image problem. Young #programmers will not devote their careers to these seemingly dead languages. As such, many Fortran and Cobol shops are desperately trying to "modernise" their codebases by translating into C++, Java, Python, etc.
This is a mistake. A weather forecast that takes a couple of hours for a Fortran implementation that runs on a 1000-CPU supercomputer will take months for a Python version that runs in an enterprise cloud. Analogous examples abound for Cobol. These niche systems are cloud-proof—they will not bend to the charms of cloud computing.
New language features and implementation techniques are continuously, albeit gradually, being integrated into Fortran and Cobol, and new supercomputers and mainframes are still being designed and manufactured. Yet, there is no injection of new programmers into these specialised domains.
A sensible approach, then, is this. Instead of converting pieces of code written in 60yo languages into those written in 30yo languages, design brand new languages—with dependent type system, algebraic types, type inferencing, memory safety, and other accoutrements of modernity—that target standardised Fortran and Cobol, much like TypeScript and ReScript target standardised JavaScript to "modernise" web development. And if these new languages become established, retarget them to binary.
For me an era is about to come to an end: after just over ten years at my current job (where I set up and built most of the infrastructure and code) it's time for me to move on.
From April 2024 I'll be available for part-time remote-only work. If you're looking for an all-rounder software dev and #Linux admin to attack (say) your tech debt in #Perl, #Python or even #Fortran, give me a yell 😃
RIP Niklaus #Wirth. Wirth's #Pascal was among the first programming languages I actually enjoyed, after love-hate with #Fortran, #AssemblyLanguage and #PL1. I did loads of programming in Pascal in the 1970s and 1980s, on #DEC10s, #Vaxen and on the first IBM PCs (#TurboPascal). Then, #Modula. If you are using a #Logitech device today (I am!), that's another outcome of Wirth's vast ouvre!
I found the following gem from 1972 while doing research for the article:
(Oh, yes, I WROTE A POST that I'm half-proud of! Was BASIC really THAT BAD? Why did Dijkstra say it crippled the mind?
Let's find out the broader context of the famous quote! Please share and comment if you like the post :))
Reminder that the #programming languages useful for #applications may not be the same as those used for #libraries that the applications use, and this is just fine, e.g. performance often requires that one does not rediscover the wheel by recoding libraries in #clang#cplusplus and #fortran because they are, for whatever reason , resistant to use a proper #ffi (or an #IPC) #api.
67 years ago on October 15, 1956, The programming language FORTRAN, short for "Formula Translation," was introduced to the public.
It was the first general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language, originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications. FORTRAN gained popularity and became a vital tool in scientific and engineering applications
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. This ranking is organized according to their popularity as of Sep 2023:
(1) Python
(2) C
(3) C++
(4) Java
(5) C#
(6) JavaScript
(7) Visual Basic
(8) PHP
(9) Assembly Language
(10) SQL
(11) Fortran
(12) Go
(13) MATLAB
(14) Scratch
(15) Delphi/Object Pascal
(16) Swift
(17) Rust
(18) R
(19) Ruby
(20) Kotlin
#Fortran 2023 passed its final ISO ballot, with 16 country votes in favor, no objections. Look for publication in late October or maybe early November. #HPC
Fortran is officially more modern than C++ 😄
A new revision of Fortran (2023), is about to drop and it includes an HTTP client. 🤯 https://fortran-lang.org #cpp#fortran