How Not to Write FORTRAN in Any Language

gManZboy writes "In an article that's sure to p/o Fortran programmers, Donn Seeley has assembled a rant that posits there are characteristics of good coding that transcend all programming languages, except Fortran. Seriously though, his point is that early FORTRAN made coding ugly. Thus the joke 'Don't write FORTRAN' was applied to anyone with ugly code. Though Fortran has in recent years overcome its early challenges, the point -- 'Don't write FORTRAN' (i.e. ugly stuff) -- still applies."

Comments

Re:Learning It?

[phritz]

Is Fortran worth learning? And are there any things that it does a lot better than other languages?

Maybe, and absolutely. Note that the article ignorantly used FORTRAN to mean FORTRAN 66. In fact, Fortran 90 has all the features of a modern programming language. Add to that the fact that fixed-format produces far prettier looking code than C's mess of curly braces and parentheses, although you can also use free-format if you choose. Really, the article makes no sense if you look at what FORTRAN is today.

Answering your questions directly:
Fortran 90 does array, vector, and matrix processing better than any other language, and can do some parallelization of vector processing with a compiler flag. If you're doing scientific programming, Fortran 90 is really the language you should be using. On the other hand, for programs that are actually supposed used by laypeople, there's not much support for doing that with FORTRAN.