• @[email protected]
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    248 hours ago

    Fortran is still a good language for some purposes I think.

    And I feel the same way, C++ tries to solve the problem of having too many features by adding more features.

    • @rottingleaf
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      36 hours ago

      … for the very reason that Fortran you can grasp in an evening.

    • Troy
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      108 hours ago

      Don’t get me wrong. There is still a time and a place for Fortran. And this will also likely always be the case for C++. But I’m not sure it is entirely wise to choose it if you’re creating a new project anymore.

      • @Valmond
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        24 hours ago

        You might be right, but I have heard that song a lot of times, python, java, ml, pascal, obscure webdev.languages, AI will do it, typescript, etc etc etc

        I’d go with a better python than rust, you can put that “once in a lifetime asm optimized memsafe multi threaded code” in a package and just use it from python. But python has GIL and you can’t just remove it so who knows what will be the next shiny thing? Probably several languages, like for easy peasy stuff up to hardcore multi threaded memory safe stuff. Gotta push us oldtimers out in some way, right :-) ?

          • @Valmond
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            22 hours ago

            What I meant with that is if you remove the GIL, the people have to understand parallel access to data and a lot of orher quite complicated paradigms, which defeats, IMO, the whole idea of having a “simpler” language paired with a more versatile but more complex and complicated language, like C++.

      • Clay_pidgin
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        55 hours ago

        I’m barely competent at programming. What is the use case for Fortran, besides maintaining ancient code?

        • lad
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          44 hours ago

          A lot of computational heavy tasks for science were done in Fortran at least ten years ago (and I think still are). I was told that’s mainly because Fortran has a good deal of libraries for just that, and it was widely taught in academia so this is a common ground between the older and newer generations.

          I think it may be gradually superseded by Python, but I don’t know if it is