Well right now my work involves FORTRAN and while browsing through some documentation on WWW I came upon this piece by Mr. Richard Kass and I liked what he said and thought it might be proper for Aeronautical folks to read about this so here we go.
FORTRAN is the dominant programming language used in scientific applications. It is therefore important for physics (or engineering) students to be able to read and modify FORTRAN code. From time to time, so-called experts predict that FORTRAN will rapidly fade in popularity and soon become extinct. This may actually happen as C (or C++) is rapidly growing in popularity. However, previous predictions of the downfall of FORTRAN have always been wrong. FORTRAN is the most enduring computer programming language in history. One of the main reasons FORTRAN has survived and will survive is software inertia. Once a company has spent many people-years and perhaps millions of dollars on a software product, it is unlikely to try to translate the software to a different language. Reliable software translation is a very difficult task and there’s 40 years of FORTRAN code to replace!
