You use the right tool for the right job. You don't use a table saw to slice a pizza. In the same way you won't use Fortran in Web design, you will NEVER use Java for massive computational tasks.
I'm in the field of physics and astronomy and I'm as old as Fortran 77 itself. It is still being used today, specifically if you have a million point model of a galaxy that you are going to run one simple calculation on over and over again. If you have a dual processor machine, or a massively parallel machine, Fortran is optimized for such tasks and such hardware.
Also, I find it necessary to know Fortran and C/C++ and IDL, so I can utilize old, yet optimized Fortran code of my professors' with new "fancier" code I write today.
As another alum to CWRU, all I can say is I hope they do this upgrade right this time. I was taking classes there during the "upgrade" to ATM and while everything was far faster than the typical 28.8K connection of the day, there were alot of bandwidth problems due to their approach to implementing the ATM.
Although I only used the ethernet connection, and not the ATM, (First PC was only a 486, the second was a PII 233, but at the time they didn't have reliable ATM drivers for the PII architecture) and the bandwidth for ethernet users was always much higher than your typical ATM user. Why? The infrastructure of the CWRUnet ethernet set-up was well established and optimized from the central core servers out to the routers for each building and dorm. The huge mistake of the ATM system was they tried to set it up all at once, instead of testing the stability of a core set-up before branching out to every other computer. The result was an absolute mess as far as lost email and dropped packets left and right. All of this seriously effected everyone from the astronomy dept generating 1 million point galaxy models to the untold hundreds of Quake and StarCraft games going on over campus.
So, now that they have a new guy at ITS running the show, lets hope they do better this time.
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You use the right tool for the right job. You don't use a table saw to slice a pizza. In the same way you won't use Fortran in Web design, you will NEVER use Java for massive computational tasks. I'm in the field of physics and astronomy and I'm as old as Fortran 77 itself. It is still being used today, specifically if you have a million point model of a galaxy that you are going to run one simple calculation on over and over again. If you have a dual processor machine, or a massively parallel machine, Fortran is optimized for such tasks and such hardware. Also, I find it necessary to know Fortran and C/C++ and IDL, so I can utilize old, yet optimized Fortran code of my professors' with new "fancier" code I write today.
As another alum to CWRU, all I can say is I hope they do this upgrade right this time. I was taking classes there during the "upgrade" to ATM and while everything was far faster than the typical 28.8K connection of the day, there were alot of bandwidth problems due to their approach to implementing the ATM. Although I only used the ethernet connection, and not the ATM, (First PC was only a 486, the second was a PII 233, but at the time they didn't have reliable ATM drivers for the PII architecture) and the bandwidth for ethernet users was always much higher than your typical ATM user. Why? The infrastructure of the CWRUnet ethernet set-up was well established and optimized from the central core servers out to the routers for each building and dorm. The huge mistake of the ATM system was they tried to set it up all at once, instead of testing the stability of a core set-up before branching out to every other computer. The result was an absolute mess as far as lost email and dropped packets left and right. All of this seriously effected everyone from the astronomy dept generating 1 million point galaxy models to the untold hundreds of Quake and StarCraft games going on over campus. So, now that they have a new guy at ITS running the show, lets hope they do better this time.