[cing]

Is Fortran actually the best choice for this application? I don't know how heavy the calculations are for sports analytics, but I'm guessing it's less advanced than scientific simulations. Who cares how numerically efficient your code is if you use 10x the lines than a modern language and spend half your time struggling to maintain it.

[vonmoltke]

On the sports analytics question I don't have any knowledge or experience, but I can see operations there turning into multi-matrix statistical correlations and such.

On the subject of being the best language for the job, Fortran does not use 10x more lines than more modern languages. In fact, in many cases it uses less. When I was working on real-time signal processing algorithms we used to prototype algorithms in Fortran[1], then implement them in C. I also used to use Python with SciPy and NumPy for analysis, as well as Matlab. Matlab's huge toolbox library notwithstanding, the Fortran implementations were usually shorter, simpler, and easier to understand than any of the other languages. It was only bias and preconceived notions that kept it from being used in the real system. I would have loved to see Fortran subroutines running the algorithms underneath the C distributed framework.

[1] Until someone in management and the customer team decided to have the scientists write their algorithms directly in the real-time C. That is a rant for another day.

[na85]

Not sure why code to crunch some statistics would have a huge maintenance cost. There goes one point out the window.

As for the first, a) I touched on the fact that Fortran is a modern language and b) unless you've got examples showing two side-by-side implementations of the same algorithm with Fortran being 10x longer, then it sounds like you're just another of the aforementioned hipsters who is experiencing aversion to something just because it is not new and shiny.

[noonespecial]

The language is only half the machine. The human is the other half. The question is not if Fortran is the best choice, it's is Fortran the best choice for him.

[sampo]

> Is Fortran actually the best choice for this application?

Fortran is like fast, typed, compiled Matlab (with smaller standard library, but a lot of numerical libraries available all over internet).

Nut yes, exploratory data analysis, something interactive like NumPy + Matplotlib, Matlab or R might be better.

But NumPy + matplotlib is kinda painful to set up first to be interactive, R the language is wonky, and Matlab cost a lot of money (and the free alternative, Octave, has much more limited graphics, and they are kind of ugly, too).

Of course, Fortran has no graphing capabilities, so one needs some tool for that anyway.