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Comment by BeetleB

4 days ago

Have people moved on from Fortran 77?

It was frustrating that, 30 years after Fortran 77, professors were insisting in writing in that dialect. Thank God I escaped that hell.

Edit: Since people don't understand my point - I'm well aware of the existence of newer Fortran standards. But in much of academia, the professors insisted on sticking with Fortran 77.

19 comments

BeetleB

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sampo  4 days ago

> Have people moved on from Fortran 77?

Apparently not. Fortran 90 standard was published 35 years ago, in 1991. But a majority of comments in this thread are about FORTRAN 77. It's like the last 35 years didn't happen at all.

btrettel  4 days ago

Your experience is not universal.

I used modern Fortran in undergrad and grad research from 2011 to about 2015. I rarely ever encountered FORTRAN 77 back then, and never had to write any. I worked as an intern at NIST and LANL during that time too and it was modern Fortran there as well. At NIST, as far as I'm aware, that group had been using modern Fortran for probably a decade or more before I started in 2011.

I didn't have to write any FORTRAN 77 until 2025 in my current job when I was given a legacy code to work with.

jibalt  4 days ago

After Fortran 77 came Fortran 90, Fortran 95, Fortran 2003, Fortran 2008, Fortran 2018, and Fortran 2023.

  • jibalt  3 days ago

    > I'm well aware of it.

    Even if that were true, which I doubt, there was nothing in your comment to indicate that, and in fact it contradicted it ... if you were aware, then it's nonsensical to ask whether people have moved on. It's well known that Fortran 90 was a major advance over Fortran 77 and that of course people moved on.

dranudin  4 days ago

Yes. With Fortran 90 most of the real archaic stuff was already gone. And they keep publishing new standards.

jleyank  4 days ago

There was a CS literature joke that I saw back in 1982. "Whatever language is used to program high-performance machines, it will be called Fortran.".