FORTRAN Programming-Though The Logic Is Still Good
| Field | Programing |
| Went Obsolete | During the microcomputer “revolution” (or never, depending on who you ask) |
| Made Obsolete By | Modern programing languages |
| Knowledge Assumed | Basic mathematics and algebra |
| When useful | Fortran can still be encountered in scientific and engineering prorgamming environments. Many existing mainframe programs still use Fortran |
Fortran is one of the oldest “high-level” programming languages, and arguably the first high-level language to gain widespread acceptance. The name Fortran came from FORmula? TRANslation?. It remains popular for several engineering and science applications where computational analysis is important. It is specially popular in the HPC arena.
There are still many compilers available for Fortran today. However, the skillset that came from working with older forms of FORTRAN (as it used to be sold) are no longer necessary. Use of Fortran also tends toward maintaining legacy code, or as a niche language as Java and other C-syntax languages encroach more and more on Fortran's former domains. Thus a case could be made for Fortran programming being an obsolete skill.
Check with people who do scientific supercomputing. As recently as the very-early 21st century, parallelizing FORTRAN compilers were still superior to other “more modern” parallel programming languages in generating efficient code. Cluster computing using low-cost off-the-shelf CPUs? may have changed the situation.
FORTRAN is still the workhorse for many scentific/engineering solutions as a majority of alternate languages lack the the high-level mathematics libraries that have made FORTRAN so successful.
