[safgasCVS]

What other languages can we expect to see a similar surge in demand? FORTRAN? In the data analysis space my bet is on SAS

[metreo]

Fortran (standardized without caps for at least the last couple decades) is current to the 2018 release. I haven't come across anybody who cares or is using it. You do eventually see a lot of older code in it in symbolic and algebraic maths in the deeper code bases still because the algorithms are complex and nobody really wants to touch someone else work if it can still be wrapped in something like R or Python and is nearly as performant as C/++.

[otabdeveloper4]

There's Fortran inside your numpy/R installation doing the heavy lifting.

Not sure if there's real demand for paid Fortran programmers, but it's certainly not a dead language.

[tossup8536]

BLAS benchmarks show that fortran is actually faster than C is lots of scenarios.

[metreo]

Sure if you turn off bounds checking or similar.

[TheRealKing]

The modern Fortran (2008-2018) is indeed used actively, although less than 40 years ago, as there are many rivals now. Just check out the Fortran GitHub projects.

[metreo]

I guess the thing about Fortran, to circle back to your question, is that it isn't common in critical infrastructure.

[soneil]

It's often critical, just in a completely different field. The best explanation is simply the names - Common Business-Orientated Language vs Formula Translation.

So the Fortran equivalent of the current situation was NASA being desperate for Fortran programmers to patch Voyager a few years ago (which may have been overblown - my understanding is that they had the programmers, someone just took the "what's the problem?" and ran with it). Orbital models, weather models, stuff that's deep science put into code. COBOL is stuff where business logic is put into code.

They're both titans in their fields to this day - just different fields. At a very, very high level it’s essentially matlab vs excel.

[charlesap]

I work at a place that writes new Fortran code today. Also c++, Python, Julia. Scientists will choose the least impedance mismatch to a library, some needed data set, or their brain.

[metreo]

To be sure. And I don't think that modern Fortran is overly obscure that you couldn't basically pick it up over a weekend from the language specification.

Every modern Linux distribution has a current gfortran bundled.

[TheRealKing]

Modern Fortran is amazing. Force your company to move to Fortran 2008 and beyond. A good reference book is Modern Fortran Explained: Incorporating Fortran 2018.

[moonbug]

are accurate weather forecasts not part of society's critical infrastructure?

[metreo]

They are but I'm saying that the code often isn't redundant in the same way a piece of infrastructure may be.

[exdsq]

You joke but I still see FORTRAN jobs around where I live than Ruby. I even worked for a consultancy that did a Matlab -> FORTRAN rewrite.

[tossup8536]

Fortran is super fast. For math/analytical stuff it's preffered over C. But to avoid relyance on a language with so few devs, these orgs dhould only have code that the the heavy lifting math in fortran. And use expose those as wrspped functions to some other more common and easier to use/mantain/hire

[Koshkin]

Indeed - with its stricter semantics Fortran is much easier for the compiler to generate a highly optimized machine code for.