Personally, I like to think of Fortran as the language of large-scale numerical PDE and eigenproblem solvers. Most scientific and engineering problems boil down to one of these two.
At least in the US national lab system Fortran is nominally being phased out in a lot of projects. It's just gotten too hard to find highly skilled Fortran programmers to maintain these complicated projects, so a lot of codebases are gradually being moved away from it. However the reality is it's mostly aspirational; some of the large codebases have at least made big progress towards migrating onto C++ but the tail is very long indeed and it's still entrenched with many of the greybeard HPC folks. It's also tough to imagine some of the big legacy codes that are still heavily used in the nuclear industry (e.g. MNCP) migrating away due to the sheer amount of experimental validation that has been done on the existing Fortran code.
I personally know and like Fortran in its modern form, at least within its little niche. But the ability to maintain these codes long term is really important and it's tough to see that being viable with the supply of professional-level developers withering to nothing.
I don't get this. It's highly difficult to find vast troves of military reserves (ie: bodies who can do military stuff) in war time. That's what bootcamp and sergeants are for.
Hell my sister (print sales) joined a new firm and she had to spend six weeks in an intense classroom style training program the company ran to get new staff prepared for the nuances of their product.
It seems straightforward to setup a Fortran internal bootcamp for experienced developers at these massive legacy institutions, worth the upfront investment...no?
National labs should be able to attract people who can learn Fortran well enough to maintain those codes. After all the hard part is the math, not the programming.
gh02t|2 years ago
I personally know and like Fortran in its modern form, at least within its little niche. But the ability to maintain these codes long term is really important and it's tough to see that being viable with the supply of professional-level developers withering to nothing.
Solvency|2 years ago
Hell my sister (print sales) joined a new firm and she had to spend six weeks in an intense classroom style training program the company ran to get new staff prepared for the nuances of their product.
It seems straightforward to setup a Fortran internal bootcamp for experienced developers at these massive legacy institutions, worth the upfront investment...no?
wbl|2 years ago