The point of this submission being....?<p>The fact that someone runs statistics calculations in Fortran (a language whose most recent standard is dated 2008) should be shocking only to the recent generation of coders who have become "code hipsters." The guys looking for the Next Big Thing™ in programming languages.<p>These are the guys trying to cram Python into every possible goddamned use case, whether that be embedded systems or computational fluid dynamics. Whether it's the right tool for the job or not. The same guys who are implementing a Ruby interpreter in Haskell, running on a VM written in Rust. Why? Because damn it, their language of choice is shiny and new, and therefore it must be the best.<p>Nope. You use the best tool for the job. If you're already familiar with a language and that language is perfectly well-suited for the task at hand (in this case mathematics) then you use that language.<p>Fortran is old, which means it's seen a lot of development. The compiler optimizations are very, very efficient and Fortran code runs extremely fast. In fact, Fortran was explicitly designed for running mathematics algorithms on computers.<p>tl;dr Fortran is actually a great choice for this application and I hate hipsters.
I'm guessing the title was chosen because the submitter thought coding in Fortran was stupid, or old, or whatever. The reality is that Fortran has been updated frequently and for what he's doing seems like a reasonable choice (plus he probably has a store of routines that he likes to use for certain analyses).<p>Old language != Bad language<p>From TFA:<p>"SI: Is it true you still code in Fortran?<p>JS: Yeah, what’s wrong with that? It’s a good language. Fortran is real good for doing mathematics and running it real quickly. I’m not doing Photoshopping or anything like that. I’m just running numbers."
Fortan isn't dead, by far.<p>There is a lot of scientific and industrial code (in astronomy, aeronautics, ...) that is in Fortran. And I'm not talking about legacy stuff that is only in maintenance mode. These codes are still evolving and get new functionalities. They're not in Fortran only for legacy reasons (though that plays some part). They're in Fortran because Fortan is still the right tool for the job.<p>Scientific computing, where is IO is pretty much never the bottleneck, is a completely different world from web development. Python/Numpy is usable for some tasks, but only because it delegates a lot of stuff to underlying FOrtran code..
Absolutely nothing wrong with Fortran. In the 90s I worked on source-level optimizations in the HPF (High-Performance Fortran) compiler at Thinking Machines: not having a numerical processing background (and having only used Fortran for one course in college, which was Microsoft Fortran with each compiler phase on a separate floppy) it was fascinating to work on, and I found Fortran 90 to be pretty compelling in a lot of numeric operations. There is a lot of code out there that was written and debugged years ago and there is no reason to change.
A lot of financial services academic modelling is still done in Fortran too. The old programs still run, and new results keep coming.<p>It was interesting that the NCAA doesn't include scores in their methodology, just wins and losses. Is that because they don't want to officially encourage teams to run up the score? It doesn't stop teams from doing that, but perhaps that's because they are trying to impress other audiences.
So do most of the world's cosmologists, you know boring stuff like the fabric of the universe, the beginning of time, the hunt for dark matter.<p>It's parallelisable - if that's a word.<p>Admittedly the stuff I have seen is all written without knowledge of the maxim "write your code as if the next person to fix your code is a mad axe murderer who knows where you live."<p>But they still unlock the secrets of the universe with it, even with unusual naming conventions.