FORTRAN thread

Here's a Question, Lains: If there is so much FORTRAN code out there on important machines and nobody to maintain it, why aren't college-level FORTRAN courses pushed on students? Also, general FORTRAN thread.

College's don't give a fuarrrk about the industry. I'm a CS major, and it blows my mind how much these kids don't know about computers. Say words like "linux" or "c" and the average CS student's face goes white.

>If there is so much FORTRAN code out there on important machines and nobody to maintain it, why aren't college-level FORTRAN courses pushed on students? You don't need to maintain it. It's been worked on for 30+ years, it's pretty much done and has been untouched for years at this point.

I tried to learn FORTRAN once. I work with with R, OCTAVE, and all that. I thought it would be useful so I could write efficient routines. I was debating between C and FORTRAN, and I read somewhere that the latter was easy to learn with an OCTAVE background. I could not find a single good resource on FORTRAN, so I gave up. I have attached the book that showed most promise to me, as it kinda follows modern structure of teaching you through applications from page 1. But once the programs became non-trivial, the authors' code was horrible (I believe, maybe FORTRAN is just horrible xP).

>>6145 If you take a numerical methods course, it will probably be in Fortran. Besides very small numeric kernels, not a whole lot of Fortran is written these days. Everyone uses numpy or MATLAB or something else that wraps Fortran code.

>If there is so much FORTRAN code out there on important machines and nobody to maintain it, why aren't college-level FORTRAN courses pushed on students? Colleges are either research-oriented or employment-oriented (or both/mix). The research-oriented ones don't care about fortran because it's old news. The employment-oriented ones want to maximize the number of people who are employed in industry after graduating, and, for the most part, other languages have a higher chance of getting you hired. You can pose the same question about cobol. Fact is if you teach 100 students C# and Java, and a 100 students cobol and fortran, the former will see more students employed in most locations.

Cus CS majors have a hard on for hating Fortran cus all they know about Fortran is that it was invented in the 50s and you need line numbers and goto statements everywhere. They don't know anything about modern Fortran. Also Fortran is mostly taught in physics departments these days. But the main thing is that the CS curriculum is not a programming course. It is meant to teach the fundamentals of computing that should last you for decades, not a means to get you a job that will be obsolete after the current flavor of the month language dies out.