Fortran - a "technology that refuses to die"

From: Steve Lionel (steve.lionel_at_intel.com)
Date: 01/31/04 

Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 16:17:33 GMT

I was reading the February issue of MIT Technology Review, and it had an
article entitked "Ten Technologies That Refuse to Die" (a follow-up to an
October 2003 article on ten technologies that "deserve to die"). Some on
the list were analog watches, dot-matrix printers and vacuum tubes. Number
10 was Fortran.

"Forty-seven years after IBM unleashed it, Fortran (FORmula TRANslation),
the original "high-level programming language [wouldn't that be COBOL? -
Steve], would seem to be the infotech equivalent of cuneiform. But it's
still widely used, especially in scientific computing. Why has this
Eisenhower-era veteran outlasted so many hardware and software generations?
"It's partly the learning curve," says Hewlett-Packard Laboratories' Hans
Boehm, former chair of the Association for Computing Research's [I think
they meant Association for Computing Machinery - Steve] special interest
group on programming languages. "For some people it's good enough, and it's
hard to let go of something once you learn it." Adaptability and
compatibility, which made Fortran the programmer's lingua franca in the
1960s and '70s, are also the key to its viability. Major upgrades have
boosted efficiency and added features while preserving old versions intact.
So a vast number of tried-and-true Fortran 77 programs jibe with the current
Fortran 90. [sic] Microsoft, take note."

Rather patronizing, to be sure, but it was interesting to see it there. I'm
not sure what makes Boehm (http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/) an
expert on Fortran... 

-- 
Steve Lionel
Software Products Division
Intel Corporation
Nashua, NH
Intel Fortran Support:
  http://developer.intel.com/software/products/support/
User communities for Intel Fortran and Visual Fortran:
  http://softwareforums.intel.com/

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