[dchest]

the submitter thought coding in Fortran was stupid, or old, or whatever

I don't think it's stupid or old, but it's certainly interesting: in the world where hopping from one newest technology to another is normal, somebody sticking to what they are used to is noteworthy. Some other examples are Bob Staake using Photoshop 3.0 (http://www.bobstaake.com/pixfix/films.shtml) or OpenBSD using CVS (hehe) and writing their own version of it.

Maybe that's what the submitter thought.

(Yes, Fortran is still updated, but it's certainly not the cutting edge tech. Or maybe it will be, after this HN submission.)

[sampo]

> but it's certainly not the cutting edge tech

In a way, array slicing syntax has been with us since Algol 68, so it's not cutting edge. But still, Wikipedia only lists Algol, Matlab, R, Fortran, Sinclair Basic, Ada, Perl, Python and then coming to modern times, D and Go, as having that feature.

So it kind of feels like cutting edge in times when I'm lucky enough to be writing in a language that supports it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_slicing

[EliRivers]

in the world where hopping from one newest technology to another is normal

On the assumption that you're talking about programmers, I suspect it isn't. I suspect the majority of the world's programmers stay with the same few tools for years and years, sometimes (but not always) upgrading a version when they're forced to.

[dchest]

Sure, I didn't mean the World, I meant our small world of tech news / startups.