from Hacker News

Is Fortran “A Dead Language”? (2022)

by rsecora on 1/12/24, 9:59 AM with 231 comments

  • by pklausler on 1/12/24, 4:27 PM

    Fortran is hardly dead, but neither is it is well.

    On the plus side, Fortran has more actively developed implementations than any other language. It is critical to some of the most important applications that exist. One can write code in the portable subset of Fortran and extract very high performance from very expensive HPC systems over many generations of processor and systems architecture.

    On the down side, advancement of the language has become moribund -- the last major standard was in 2008 and the two revisions since then have been minor. The standards committee creates new features from whole cloth without prototyping them, and without fixing the bugs in the spec when bugs are discovered eventually by implementors. There has been no standard public test suite since F'77, so implementations vary. There are highly portable features that are not standard and there are standard features now that are not portable.

    I'm working hard to try to improve this situation on the compiler side.

  • by gumby on 1/12/24, 10:29 AM

    I think the meaningful definition of “dead language” is “nobody will begin a new code base in it any more, except as a hobby or research project”.

    Pretty likely that’s the case with COBOL, definitely Algol, PL/1, Pascal, and Prolog.

    Though uncommon or domain specific, not the case with APL (well J), Common Lisp, Forth, or Haskell.

    I think there’s more new code being written in FORTRAN these days than in those last four combined.

  • by pjmlp on 1/12/24, 10:21 AM

    Not only it is doing quite alright, latest versions 2003 onwards (latest is 2023), are quite confortable to use, offering almost a Python like experience, with a performance experience of 60+ years in compiler optmizations.

  • by coliveira on 1/12/24, 3:24 PM

    Fortran is more alive today than it was 10 years ago. If you didn't notice, a lot of numpy libraries is Fortran code, and they are improving this all the time. It is more used for scientific and machine learning programming nowadays than it ever was.

  • by stabbles on 1/12/24, 11:04 AM

    I don't know what the state of things is right now, but if Fortran is the language of choice for HPC, then explain to me why it's so hard to write portable code that targets accelerators.

    Some folks have attempted to port Fortran projects to CUDA fortran, but that only targets Nvidia GPUs. Then there was openmp 5, but barely any compiler to target AMD gpus.

    New HPC projects are written in C++ exactly because it's much easier to target various GPUs in the same code base.

    Happy to be convinced otherwise, but this is what I've observed

  • by bartlettD on 1/12/24, 10:33 AM

    Jim's article pretty much confirms my assumption that Fortran isnt "dead" but is instead more of a de-facto domain-specific language. If you're a meterologist, you'll probably be using Fortran just because all of the existing libraries are built for it.

    Unless you're doing scientific computing, Fortran is effectively dead.

  • by Wwhisperer on 1/12/24, 10:51 AM

    Jim's observation seems to be generally similar on other HPC clusters in other countries.

    A lot of scientific software, as I can confirm especially in numerical fluid dynamics, is written in FORTRAN or at least uses some libraries written in FORTRAN.

    The basis of numerical computing in form of the BLAS/LAPACK libraries is written in FORTRAN and has had a huge impact on everything in this part of computing.

    If I am not mistaken even the python libraries depend on BLAS/LAPACK, although they might be using implementations written in C or the like.

    Nevertheless, FORTRAN is still the work horse in a lot of computational scientific disciplines and should not be disregarded as being dead.

  • by seanhunter on 1/12/24, 9:59 PM

    Fortran will never die because a sufficiently determined real programmer[1] can write fortran code in any language. I have had the misfortune to encounter plenty of fortran code written in perl, C, C++, Java, SQL and even Python.

    [1] https://sac.edu/AcademicProgs/Business/ComputerScience/Pages...

  • by fortran77 on 1/12/24, 2:46 PM

    While I love and and still make a big chunk of money from Fortran consulting (mostly translating old Fortran to Python or Matlab) it’s not dead...but there’s little reason to start a new project in today.

    I hit a wall recently getting SciPy to work on a Windows Arm machine — because of lack of a Fortran compiler needed to build SciPy.

  • by emadb on 1/12/24, 10:33 AM

    The TIOBE Index [1] ranks Fortran at 12th place! Consider that Ruby is at 18th. In my opinion, this says a lot about the value of the index.

    [1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

  • by PeterStuer on 1/12/24, 4:36 PM

    In case like me you wondered about 'VASP', it is a reference to the Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package, a computer program for atomic scale materials modelling, e.g. electronic structure calculations and quantum-mechanical molecular dynamics, from first principles.

    https://www.vasp.at

  • by buescher on 1/12/24, 4:29 PM

    Fortran would have been a great programming language for embedded if the real-time extensions of the seventies had caught on.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Real-Time_Fortran

  • by redandblack on 1/12/24, 4:33 PM

    For HPC, are there missing language features that Fortan coders need?

    Helpful to understand any HPC requirements

  • by osigurdson on 1/12/24, 3:09 PM

    I didn't read the article, but I'll bet $5 that the conclusion is it is not dead.

  • by physicsguy on 1/12/24, 10:51 AM

    "ECMWF’s Integrated Forecast System"

    I had to get this compiling and running this for a University HPC cluster a few years ago, and good lord, it was hell. Manually patching things all over the place to get it running.

  • by flobosg on 1/12/24, 6:23 PM

  • by codexb on 1/12/24, 4:47 PM

    This looks more like a case study of program language use for a specific set of scientists.

    Can someone explain why Fortran remains popular within the scientific community and not elsewhere?

  • by _s_a_m_ on 1/12/24, 11:02 AM

    Who care who thinks what, a tweet, really? As if we have to agree on some pointless statements. In certain areas it is used, in others not. Now what?

    I really don't know what the point of such posts are. It is only relevant for people who want to go into scientific computing, and even there you have some GPU rewrites going on. So not everyone is using it but physicist etc. do. Also the legacy code is huge, like with C++.

  • by ivanpribec on 1/12/24, 11:19 AM

    For fun, I wrote a CHIP8 interpreter in Fortran recently [1].

    Fortran is still heavily used in computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, marine engineering, nuclear engineering, reservoir engineering, and numerous other engineering fields. Volcanologists use it to predict ash dispersal [2]. Biomedical companies use it for cardiac electrophysiology. Econometrists use it to do tax research [4]. Plasma physicists use it to design magnetic confinement fusion devices [5]. Astrophysicists use it for relativistic magnetohydrodynamics [6]. NASA uses it for all kinds of fluid dynamics-related purposes [7] (read jet engines and rockets), and so do they at CERFACS [8]. For all I know, some integrated circuit manufacturers probably use it use it [9]. It's also used in ham radio and probably some military agencies [10]. It's used in vehicle crash testing [11]. It's used in combustion simulation software [12], fire dynamics [13], hydrometallurgy (ore leaching) [14]. US Geological Survey uses it for ground-water flow modelling [15]. We could go on and on.

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38920486 [2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2008.08.008 [3] https://www.elem.bio/index.html [4] https://taxsim.nber.org/ [5] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2021.107986 [6] https://doi.org/10.3390/fluids9010016 [7] https://fun3d.larc.nasa.gov/ [8] https://www.cerfacs.fr/avbp7x/ [9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Electromagnetics_Cod... [11] https://www.openradioss.org/ [12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHEMKIN [13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Dynamics_Simulator [14] https://youtu.be/-dvG270QttE?si=AO-ky0fGwkIEmXDx [15] https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/m...

  • by RagnarD on 1/13/24, 8:28 AM

    Fortran is still a heavily used language in engineering applications, in my experience. I have the sense that quite a few programmers think that only systems geared for web development actually exist. This is a very narrow and false view.

  • by NikkiA on 1/13/24, 10:08 PM

    Programming languages don't 'die', they merely sleep until someone gets interested in them again.

    For example, in certain hipster areas of the programming web, there's plenty of interest in all of the flavours of Algol.

  • by dvh on 1/12/24, 11:00 AM

    I went to local job website and searched new jobs in last month:

        365 java
    324 javascript
    299 python
    69 c#
    59 c++
    59 php
    5 delphi
    0 fortran
    So yes, I would say fortran is dead language

  • by Koshkin on 1/12/24, 9:56 PM

    IMHO Fortran 66 was the best Fortran ever. Simple, efficient, true to its nature. Fortunately, some of the modern compilers (like e.g. Intel's) still support it.

  • by osigurdson on 1/12/24, 3:47 PM

    The same is being asked about Python:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969390

  • by google234123 on 1/12/24, 7:21 PM

    It’s unfortunate c++ hasn’t added the few features needed to completely replace Fortran.

  • by dudeinjapan on 1/12/24, 11:46 AM

    Wait... you guys don't program using punch cards? How are you supposed to do it then?

  • by ReleaseCandidat on 1/12/24, 6:31 PM

    What certainly died during the last years has been some of the last Fortran compiler companies:

    Absoft: https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/absoft-ceases-operati...

    Lahey: https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/lahey-computer-system...

    Looking at the licenses that I have had, which are SGI († 2009), Pathscale († 2011), Absoft († 2022) and Intel - Intel is to shut down in 2042.

  • by Eddy_Viscosity2 on 1/12/24, 3:20 PM

  • by animeepisode on 1/14/24, 4:42 PM

    Yes, you can say

  • by mrhashem on 1/12/24, 4:01 PM

    YES. (if not, please kill it)