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Comment by Zababa | Hacker News Reader

Replace "modern FORTRAN" with "mostly FORTRAN 90" then. The person I replied to was saying that FORTRAN's reputation as a old and antiquated language may not be deserved because there are new standard. My question was: are they actually used? If 99% of the C++ in the wild is C++98 and lower, C++11 and higher existing don't make it a "modern" language. Most people will work with the old version, and thus it would deserve a reputation as old and antiquated.

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Since Fortran 90 the name has been Fortran, not FORTRAN with all caps.

As for which version is used in the wild, it's the same as with many other languages that have stuck around for a long time. Plenty of legacy code which might still be F77, but practically all new projects, or extensive modernization of legacy code, will make use of the modern features.

I suspect Fortran's reputation is largely due to many of the foundational libraries of numerical computing like BLAS and LAPACK, are F77 (LAPACK uses a small number of 'modern' features, but largely it's still a F77 codebase). This is the kind of Fortran that non-Fortran programmers might come into contact with. But the Fortran that Fortran programmers write today is definitely much more modern.

I am trying to read your statement without concluding that you think that ignorance is a justification for a reputation.

That's not my point. My point is that if a modern FORTRAN exists and almost no one uses it, then the reputation for FORTRAN for not being modern is justified because most people that will work with it will work with the old version.

-Building? That’s just bricks, old fashioned.

-But we can build with concrete and steel and plastics and all sorts now.

-Most people use bricks though. And people are not tearing their brick houses down to rebuild them in steel. See? Building is old fashioned, antiquated!

In fact, nobody now starts a new project in F77. There’s a lot of F77 brick code around, yes. And it still does the job it was asked to do even though it gets moved to a new district every ten years.

That sounds like a strawman. You're ignoring maintenance and adding features to old codebases. It's usually the majority of the work done. Sure, you don't need to recode BLAS as it's doing its job. But not everything is BLAS.

I am sitting here looking at a 50-line Fortran routine in our codebase that says

It has been revised since then to use free form, structured programming, MODULEs, KINDs, INTENTs and IMPLICIT NONE.

If we can do it, everybody can. I have already mentioned some reasons that people don't do it. None of the reasons I have heard are "Fortran is too old and clunky".

Considering that most Java codebases are still on Java 8, I'm not sure I agree with your point that "If we can do it, everybody can". Let's agree to disagree on that.

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