FORTRAN rant

Recently I started learning Fortran. Going from Python to Fortran should not be so complicated, and from what I see so far it is a very cool language. When I started learning it, I was asking my self why it is not so popular or what limits it to such a small audience. Well, after two months approximately, I think I know the answer. Fortran is a language probably killed by bad habits of "Intellectual Property". Very few resources exist if so in the Internet regarding this language, and the few books I found, cost a fortune, and have scary licenses regarding the code examples in them. Further more, the Fortran world is full of propriety compilers with different convections and prices. The domain www.fortran.com is owned by a company, which seems to be held by one man, who is also the author of the book "Guide to Fortran 2003 Programming". This books recommends also the "The Fortran 2003 Handbook" which also posted by Springer, and the previous author is among the authors of that book, which is ,of course, sold for a highly expensive price. When you look at the website of the Fortran Company, it looks like a teenager designed it in the middle of the 90's and since then nobody bother to make a normal update to it. No other fortran.org or fortran.info exist and it seems like this language is practically limited to universities, which is a bit shame. After two months, I feel like it's a risk learning a language with no "real" community or even something similar. I can only compare it Python or Ruby or even JAVA. Not to mention long lasting languages like C/C++ which have vast resources on-line. So, I have to learn this language for my thesis, which leaves me definitely no options, but I wish the situation was different.

This entry was tagged: programming, opinion

Share this post:

Discussions/Feedback.

comments powered by Disqus