Is the return worth the investment in learning Fortran?

Question

At my current place of employment there are a handful of maybe two to three employees that add and maintain functionality of legacy fortran77 code. When I was first hired I briefly considered trying to become fluent in the ancient language, soon after I changed my mind.

This conclusion came from a combination of reasons; initially I admit the steep learning curve pushed me away. (Directly related to having a majority of my experience programming in a much higher language. Not so much that Fortran had advanced complex functionally that was mind-boggling. ) But even after I began to develop a trivial understanding of the language I found that I never had any useful ‘projects’ I could contribute. Which lead me to the realization, what good would Fortran77 be on my application if I were job searching again? It occurred to me that, unless I was interested in maintaining legacy code that some unknown long since retired employee had written thirty+ years ago, I should spend my time learning a newer, more utilized, language.

Google trends makes an interesting graph, to my point, when given Fortran.

Also interesting to note is that the combined sum of Fortran tagged questions on stackoverflow is less than 100 at the time of this post.

So what new projects and applications are suitable for a groundwork built in Fortran? Is there a large need for Fortran engineers to develop new products, or mostly to maintain old code? Has anybody heard of any recent application development surrounding Fortran?

Ultimately, is the return worth the investment in learning Fortran for a new engineer these days?

Answer 1

I think learning new languages in general is always a good thing. That said, if you're learning to enhance your own value (and not just for the fun of it), it's probably better to just learn something a little more relevant/in demand in your job search area. This will give you a better return for your time investment, IMHO.

Answer 2

A qualified yes but mostly no...

For me Fortran is used similarly at work it is possibly worth the investment since it makes you better at your job. However as a purely academic exercise I wouldn't think so. In my understanding is nothing makes it especially important to learn from a stand point of personal improvement.

If it will really help in your job its worth it to familiarize yourself with any language. They are all so interrelated its not that big a deal to learn a new language if it helps you at work.

But for purely academic language learning work on something fun like Haskell or something that can help to you build your understand of the hardware like assembler or C.

A similar post with some good information can be found here.

Answer 3

...is the return worth the investment...

If it interests you then yes. Period.

Answer 4

I think it depends on where you want to be. There are a lot of older systems that were developed in Fortran and need to be maintained. There's probably a lot of money in this.

But if you want to be cutting edge (and possibly less stable..) then learn Java or C#, or Ruby/ PHP/ ASP.NET for web dev.

Answer 5

Does your boss think it would be helpful to him/her? Not to be a total brown-nose, but this person should have an immediate impact on your situation and it makes sense to make their job easier.

If there are other languages you can put to use at your job, learn those.

Although FORTRAN may not open any job opportunities, the fact that you learned the language needed to do your job shows you're capable and you care. You don't want to be sitting in your next interview describing your current tech. situation and mention the use of FORTRAN which you have zero understanding (OK, you could probably avoid that with little effort.).

I learned FORTRAN in grad. school, created one app (Couldn't get it to compile on Win98) and haven't used it since - no regrets.

Answer 6

I work in high-performance computing and numerical weather prediction, and we are definitely using Fortran for new and old projects. I can't speak for other shops, but I know that several of us use Fortran 90 exclusively, but there are many that still use FORTRAN 77 because it's what they know, what they're comfortable with, and apparently things like dynamic memory allocation, and free-form formatting aren't important to them.

If you're in one of these areas where it's prevalent, I think it would be useful to have a basic reading knowledge of the language. Even when the paradigm moves from pure Fortran from beginning to end to something like Python for the high-level control and Fortran for the "hard" parts, knowing your way around will suit you well. Depending on previous language experience, I don't think that would be too difficult to pick up.

While there is still development and ongoing work in the Fortran language itself (e.g. Fortran 2003), I'd be thrilled if we finally got everyone caught up to Fortran 90!

Answer 7

Like @Idigas, I was going to comment on "steep learning curve," which made me chuckle.

But then I realized what's hard about Fortran (and old-style BASIC, and assembly language) to a modern programmer is the discipline to prevent the code from turning into spaghetti.

Is that what you meant by learning curve? Because both Fortran and BASIC seem like languages you pick up in an afternoon.