Once in college I was walking around campus when I noticed that one of the classes were still teaching Fortran to their students as an introductory programming language.

There's a shit ton of money to be made in maintaining old system for banks and government as all the FORTRAN and COBOL as there are few people to maintain these systems.

My local college teaches COBOL cause the Canada Revenue Agency still uses the old mainframes to process tax returns. Government of Canada is a huge employer here.

I have a friend that had to learn COBOL on the job.

FORTRAN is also used in a lot of high-performance physics software

Was it at least modern Fortran? Or was it FORTRAN 77?

@tiberius1900 fortran 77

Re: legacy systems. My university had us learn Visual Basic for similar reasons

yeah, MSc students got this language, they are poor, better they learn C

Still a heavily used language in bioinformatics

In 2006 I used FORTRAN 68 for calculus: long time ago Russian Institute of Cosmic Explorations developed libraries for internal purposes - and they are still in use, code works great!

@luckbot I really, really want to hear more on this topic

Hey, don't shittalk Fortran
It's a great legacy maintainer

Id take Fortran over Assembly any day tbh

@mkdirLuci4
Assembly's actually useful in the real world sometimes. Fortran only continues to exist because of legacy code.

@tiberius1900 truuu but fuck learning dat sheeeeit

@luckbot really? Didn't know that. Can you tell more about it?

@Highwind Yeah, our gov is quite behind on the tech infrastructure level. Montreal is a leader in ML and related stuff, but we can’t make a good infrastructure

It's damn fast and efficient...I hate when python fanboys telling me numpy's equally fast as fortran and C when the dumbfarks didn't know the MKL was written in C and Fortran