I'm curious - what do you particularly like about Fortran that isn't otherwise broadly available? Is it a matter of cultural idioms, a unique composition of features, or something else entirely?
Not OP, but I know a good use case: where I work we do lots of math and signal processing. It is done in matlab, which is great, but then we need to run it in some embedded processor. Using the C++ generated by matlab is beyond any hope. Had the code be written in Fortran (which is very possible, and would make the code clearer) it would run very fast.
Now we had a team of people translating matlab to C++
Check out D language, it should be suitable for math, signal processing, data science, embedded, etc, and it's intended to be better than Fortran, C and C++ [1].
[1] Is Fortran easier to optimize than C for heavy calculations?
I know that Fortran is highly used in the numeric world, especially due to widespread libraries such as LAPACK and BLAS, amongst others; in your opinion, what are the characteristics that make such code much more clear when written in Fortran as opposed to C or C++?
Also, do you prefer a specific version of Fortran, or is the latest one fine?
A couple big things: Fortran natively performs operations on arrays directly like Matlab or Numpy in Python (Matlab was originally a REPL-style front-end to Fortan), and Fortran compilers tend to yield quite fast code (though specific cases will have another language outperform Fortran).
That website/community was created in part by the original author of the Python Sympy library, Ondřej Čertík. He is also working on his own Fortran compiler that you can use via webassembly to play around with Fortran; find links if you want to play here: https://lfortran.org
I've only dabbled a little, but I like the general idea, and I appreciate a F/OSS Fortran compiler being developed like this alongside actively seeking to grow the Fortran community & push the language & its libraries forward.
I expect more widespread adoption of Fortran to be quite a ways out, but what Ondřej is doing for Fortran is necessary (not sufficient) for such adoption to be the case.
It is not about the language. Is about the people using it. They are typically not CS people. You cannot expect they program all the languages. They know typically python, matlab, and fortran. Of the 3, the one that would perform better is Fortran.
Can you give an example? I'm always curious what could be more readable than calling a few functions and composing them using properly named variables.
Modern Fortran (2008+) has built-in support for matrices, complex numbers, co-arrays (parallel programming), array slicing, etc. This makes it easy to write performant compiled code if you mostly deal with numerics.
Fortran has also added support for e.g. object-oriented programming, pure functions (no side effects for better optimization), and pointers. So idiomatic modern Fortran code looks very different from the “Fortran 77” code that many people might think of when they hear the name :).
Sure, not in the traditional sense. Since it does not make small standalone libraries, even though possible, I would not make a native extension with it. But juliacall works fine for Python and R. Quite seamless.