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> What happens when some of this old hardware breaks and it becomes not only impossible to find replacement parts but also impossible to fabricate new ones in house.

You get a modern Fortran compiler, you compile the old code for the new stuff and off you go. What am I missing?

> Eventually, like all languages, Fortran will die out as time goes on. So few people know it now that it is inevitable.

Like ALL languages? Ha, tell that to the COBOL programmers at the heart of some financial institutions mate. Heck, RPG is still supported on some IBM hardware.

I'm talking about languages on a larger scale. Do you mean to tell me that COBOL or Fortran will last _forever_?

All languages die out eventually. It does not matter that it is a programming language, the concept will remain.

Nothing is perpetual, nothing lasts forever. I hate to break it to you, but eventually something will give.

   "Slowly start rewriting all of the stack, and transferring everything to more modern systems designed to be just as long term as their predecessors so that in the event of a replacement being needed it exists."

This process is obvious, and has been going on for decades already.

There are challenges of course, but thinking the problem is coding infrastructure and the lack of "modern" languages like ruby is a category error.

I agree, that is not the way I feel.

You must remember that relatively speaking compared to Fortran, C is a "modern" language.

> You must remember that relatively speaking compared to Fortran, C is a "modern" language.

In what way?

Fortran code is certainly not lower level than C and in many cases higher level. Furthermore, they are closer in age, for example, than Smalltalk is to Ruby.

Fortran: Created 1957 C: Created 1972

And those where not simply 15 years, they were a very important 15 years of development.

Relatively, C is more modern than Fortran. It is also certainly more widespread.

How about a third option: keep training new programmers on Fortran and improve tooling - just like we do with every other language (and, afaik, this is happening with Fortran.)

Most Fortran programmers I know aren't programmers by trade - they're scientists or analysts who need to crunch numbers. Fortran doesn't need to be as feature complete or cutting edge as more general purpose languages.