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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

I went to local job website and searched new jobs in last month:

    365 java
    324 javascript
    299 python
    69 c#
    59 c++
    59 php
    5 delphi
    0 fortran

So yes, I would say fortran is dead language

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It's because all these jobs using Fortran are scientific research projects. It is not explicitly asked, but if you are doing high performance computing, chances are you will be using Fortran. Scientific codes live for decades.

For example, I'm using a code that has been started in 1981. It is still very relevant and performant. Of course I wish I could use C++ or even Rust, but the fact is that (high performance) numerical computing is first class citizen in Fortran, which is not the case in C++ or Rust. I wish however that the tooling around Fortran wasn't stuck in the nineties.

Bjarne Stroustrup on Fortran users [1]:

> Fortran is harder to compete with. It has a dedicated following who [...] care little for programming languages or the finer points of computer science. They simply want to get their work done.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4263269

3 of our 15 devs write Fortran, but we don't find them through dev job sites. They have PhDs related to hydrodynamic simulations and many of the people in the field know each other through conferences.

The jobs that use Fortran will be more concerned that you know things like crystal plasticity and molecular dynamics at the Ph.D. level.

Was that all of the languages?

Where are Go and Scala

    15 scala
    9 golang

And rust ??? C'mon it's HN! :-)

When I search Fortran, all I see are aerospace jobs. So yeah, nothing fun an exciting. /s :)

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