I'm an engineer who programmed for many years in Fortran, was interested in OO languages, but always reverted to Fortran for real work. My first real OO code was a library to do Automatic Differentiation for uncertainty analysis. This has been done very successfully in Fortran 77 (ADIFOR for example), but the result is essential a preprocessor that reads a Fortran code and outputs new code Fortran code with extra statements for calculating derivatives. In an OO language that supports operator overloading, such as C++ or Python (not Java), no preprocessing step is needed, you just redefine math operations and functions to include the calculation of derivatives. In all, a much cleaner, easier and more elegant solution. Functions and operators for matrices and even more complicated data structures are relatively easy to develop and can really simplify programs that are written to solve engineering problems.
Since this first effort at using an OO language I have since given up on Fortran to write engineering code. I mostly use Python (which has a very good numerics library) and occasionally use C or C++ when extra speed is needed. I really hate going back to Fortran because it now seems so restricting. I personally would recommend looking at Python as very nice OO language for engineering calculations.
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I'm an engineer who programmed for many years in Fortran, was interested in OO languages, but always reverted to Fortran for real work. My first real OO code was a library to do Automatic Differentiation for uncertainty analysis. This has been done very successfully in Fortran 77 (ADIFOR for example), but the result is essential a preprocessor that reads a Fortran code and outputs new code Fortran code with extra statements for calculating derivatives. In an OO language that supports operator overloading, such as C++ or Python (not Java), no preprocessing step is needed, you just redefine math operations and functions to include the calculation of derivatives. In all, a much cleaner, easier and more elegant solution. Functions and operators for matrices and even more complicated data structures are relatively easy to develop and can really simplify programs that are written to solve engineering problems.
Since this first effort at using an OO language I have since given up on Fortran to write engineering code. I mostly use Python (which has a very good numerics library) and occasionally use C or C++ when extra speed is needed. I really hate going back to Fortran because it now seems so restricting. I personally would recommend looking at Python as very nice OO language for engineering calculations.