| 1) What makes a language like Fortran so intimidating? I'm not sure, I would like to know the answer to this. At least for modern Fortran. 2) What makes Fortran so much 'faster' at computation than C? I don't know if the computation of Fortran is always faster than C (I thought they were comparable), but at least in development time, it was a huge improvement for me. I was forced to use Fortran 2003 at university for numerical simulations etc and expected it to be terrifying but found it very pleasant. Instead it was when programming C later on that I got slightly frustrated. - It's easy to learn. No need to learn about pointers etc. - It's very math friendly. The fact that you can easily extract and use sub matrices/array is probably my favorite feature. In C I needed to write loops, pass around array length or matrix sizes, etc. Multi dimensional arrays got annoying to work with and ended up writing matrices as column-major vectors. - It has some nice built in functions such as matrix multiplications (no loops for this). It also has great math libraries like BLAS/LAPACK - Offers OOP I haven't made use yet of the advantage I hear most often i.e. for HPC. |