[rootbear]

I work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and I can tell you that Fortran is indispensable. It is the primary language used in numerical simulations, such as climate, stellar dynamics, cosmology, etc. This is partly due to inertia; scientists don't like to spend time learning new programming languages. Also, the various Fortran libraries used in this work are thoroughly understood and no one wants to change them or port them. Most of the code here is in Fortran 95, which may look odd, but has all the things a reasonable "Structured Programming" language should have. Later versions added some Object Oriented features but I don't think they've caught on much around here.

I don't personally work in Fortran, but I'm not repelled by the idea. The thing that would attract me to it, as a former computer graphics programmer, is the decent support for arrays. C99 is better than C89, but it's not where Fortran is. Sure, C++ can do it with classes but, goodness me, that is one complex language. One pays a hefty price if all one wants is decent array handling. And speaking of complex, Fortran has had complex numbers for decades. I've never used complex numbers in C99, so I don't know how they compare. I'm hearing murmurs of moving some things to Rust, when it matures, but I think the jury is still out on that.

I always like to include the quote below in discussions like this:

“I don’t know what the programming language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called FORTRAN.” – Charles Anthony Richard Hoare, circa 1982