The AstroStat Slog » Fortran http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog Weaving together Astronomy+Statistics+Computer Science+Engineering+Intrumentation, far beyond the growing borders Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:05:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4 Do people use Fortran? http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/2009/do-people-use-fortran/ http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/2009/do-people-use-fortran/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:41:42 +0000 hlee http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/?p=3915 I’m very sure that Fortran is one of the major scientific programming languages. Many functions, modules, and libraries are written in this language. Without being aware of, these routines are ported into many script languages. However, I become curious whether Fortran is still the major force in astronomy or statistics, compared to say 20 years ago (10 seems too small).

I recently placed my Numerical Recipes in Fortran in someone’s hands because I can access the electronic version of NR in C/C++. I have some manuals about Fortran 77 and 90/95, and IMSL in Fortran but I haven’t put my hands on them in recent years. I now feel that these manuals are on the verge of recycling bins or deletion. But the question about the trend in scientific computation languages pulls my sleeve to think over. With a bit of shyness, I want to ask scientists with long experience in both fields for their opinions about Fortran. Do any experienced scientists ask their students or post-docs to acquire knowledge in Fortran? While young people pursuing Python, R, and other scripting languages thanks to GNU GPL (There are a few caveats in this transition, but I’ll discuss that later).

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