Comment by andy99
2 years ago
I've asked chatGPT a fair number of Fortran questions. There are differences - Fortran is still in use lots of places, there are forums and documentation sites (though presumably that's true for COBOL). But compare to python, there is way less info out there on how to do different things, for example little Stack Overflow content.
I'd say I has mixed results, definitely chatGPT knows the language and can give examples but I've also had a lot of frustrating things it wasn't able to resolve.
Fortran also has the disadvantage of numerous separate dialects/flavours that plenty of times can't be mixed. And rarely is the exact style mentioned in random code found somewhere.
It got a lot better with Fortran 95 and newer, but in the old world of e.g. lahey compilers and custom commands only available there, any LLM has failed me consistently to stick to these intricacies. I can't even blame them, when asking humans questions about these topics, you'll get all sorts of answers that are equally close to a correct solution, but almost never precisely correct.