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Happy Fortran Day

 
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silverfrost
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Joined: 29 Nov 2006
Posts: 191
Location: Manchester

PostPosted: Sat Oct 15, 2016 10:22 am    Post subject: Happy Fortran Day Reply with quote

Fortran was unveiled 60 years ago today: http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/October/15/
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DanRRight



Joined: 10 Mar 2008
Posts: 2813
Location: South Pole, Antarctica

PostPosted: Sat Oct 15, 2016 7:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If I'd be with age better looking and stronger like Fortran!

One major and stupid mistake of way too conservative Fortran Standard Committees in the past was not to include common graphing utilities like draw_line, draw_polygon, draw_circle etc which this compiler had from its start.

If included, today we would have huge libraries of nice plotting functions natively in Fortran. Same like with libraries of general mathematical purpose which allowed Fortran to survive nicely. This is what 99% of scientists and engineers basically need -- it is to calculate something and plot it. Instead we got millions of third party graphics utilities, almost all of them dead by now and scientists and engineers plot keep scratching the head which one to use which will not get out of support too.

That would keep the adoption rate of this compiler an order larger because there would be no such things like Matlab,Mathematica etc

Larger users base would keep developers working harder and introduce Object Oriented, networking and parallel functions, OS handling etc long ago. That also would translate into smaller users base of C, C++, VB etc

And finally Fortran would need the no-compilation commands with closer connection to OS functions, but some of these simpletons insisted to keep "pure fortran" approach as this has no direct relationship to FORtmula TRANslation. Then Python would not exist too.

Just one mistake cost Fortran way too much. Remembering discussions of beginning of 90th my impression was that many members of the FS committee were totally not qualified. A la club of pensioners. For sure for example no one knew what for Fortran needs OO as no one knew what it is. Right now there is almost no single barely adopted language on the planet which has no OO function, even Python has it.

But still it survived all the recessions and exoduses and is getting better then the vast majority of other languages
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