Why Fortran?

(c) 2017 by Barton Paul Levenson

Why "Formula translation" indeed? It's old. Few businesses use it. It doesn't have all the snazzy, fourth- and fifth-generation features of languages like C++ and Java and Python. It's not sexy at all.

This web site is the Intellectual Survival Kit. Presumably you're here because you want to learn what is and is not true. I talk about formal logic here, and statistical analysis. If you want to do your own research, you don't want snazzy. You want high-speed number crunching. In short, you want the programming language scientists have used since 1954 and still use today, as I write this in 2017. Looked at another way, you want the language that has been in continuous development for more than sixty years.

The arrogant Pascal programmers I went to CMU with in the '70s called it "Fortrash." They preferred block-structured languages with lots of semicolons. Their modern-day counterparts prefer obscure, object-oriented code which calls routines, which call other routines, which call other routines, all to get simple things done.

Well, guess what? The Fortran of 2017 is not the Fortran of 1954. Modern Fortran, besides being the fastest compiled language on God's green Earth, has been through many successive versions, each more powerful than the last. The most recent standard is Fortran 2008. This web site teaches Fortran 95, because that's easiest to get from the internet. For free, I might add. But don't worry that it's the 1995 standard. It's still plenty powerful.

Click below to go to the tutorial of your choice.