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Comment by burningChrome | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a salesforce partner and we spent the two years I was there working with a large ag equipment manufacturer. They had two legacy systems that were still (as I was told) some combination of Fortran and early Unix systems. They had been reluctant to upgrade them because one of the their main manufacturing machines was still running on it and they were terrified if they upgraded and something went wrong, it would cost them millions in production time.

As you pointed out, you can't find floppy discs or disc manufacturers any more. I do remember one of the VP's of this company saying as long as they keep teaching Fortran to college engineers, they have no reason to upgrade yet. That got a few raised eyebrows from our team. We relented and upgraded what they were comfortable with - but man oh man it was quite the eye opener for me as a young dev how the thought processes of the people running these companies really are.

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Fortran is still used in scientific computing.

As long as those manufacturing systems were air-gapped and working, I can understand being conservative with changes. Of course at some point you're at risk of hardware failures too, for things that are likely NLA.

> Of course at some point you're at risk of hardware failures too, for things that are likely NLA.

Yeah, that's really the biggest issue with these systems. Were I one of these manufacturers I'd invest in getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware. The last thing they'll want to deal with is that their software was written for Sun Spark and that no longer exists.

That said, hard to go wrong porting over the x86 at this point.

> ...getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware.

Some of the signal control infrastructure for the Melbourne rail network was ported over to an emulated PDP-11 System for this reason. This was previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514553

“NLA”?

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Fortran is still the choice for Nuclear Engineering too.

My understanding, from a long retired uncle (after a 40 year career at the National Institues of Health writing nothing but Fortran), is that Claude writes perfectly idiomatic, performant Fortran. Which I suppose is not a surprise given how it was trained, but I still found amusing to hear.

Have the idioms of Fortran changed much over the decades? Because idiomatic C++ today is unrecognizable to how people had to write for VC++ Win32 until well-until the 2010s.

Yes, infamously so. It was fixed-width at one point.

My humbling Claude experience was pointing at a codebase it took me weeks to get to a good 2003 standard, and watch it do the next fifteen years, cleanup, refactoring, feature additions that needed the tech debt solved I never got round to first, in minutes.

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