No. I’ve never heard this before. It’s true that scientists don’t always write the clearest code, but Fortran, and even the style of Fortran typically written by engineers and physicists, is comparatively straightforward to read. It is named for FORmula TRANsator, after all. You will recognize the equations in the code. Fortran is inherently easier to read than C; it’s really not harder to read than Python. You can make it hard to read by doing complicated array indexing tricks, of course, and there are sometimes good reasons to resort to that.
And no one except other domain experts will ever have any interest in looking at your source. Why would they? No one except someone designing a website will ever want to try to figure out your CSS either.
Ok, now I see where the confusion is coming from. Fortran is used pretty much exclusively for numerical software. A lot of numerical software has very simple control flow using very few and very simple types. Numbers haven't changed much since they were invented. Fortran is used very differently than you're imagining.
What is it about Fortran’s control flow that makes you think it’s particularly hard to read? Say, harder than Python? Note that people don’t generally use computed GOTOs any more.
Comments
“True?”
No. I’ve never heard this before. It’s true that scientists don’t always write the clearest code, but Fortran, and even the style of Fortran typically written by engineers and physicists, is comparatively straightforward to read. It is named for FORmula TRANsator, after all. You will recognize the equations in the code. Fortran is inherently easier to read than C; it’s really not harder to read than Python. You can make it hard to read by doing complicated array indexing tricks, of course, and there are sometimes good reasons to resort to that.
And no one except other domain experts will ever have any interest in looking at your source. Why would they? No one except someone designing a website will ever want to try to figure out your CSS either.
All code gets looked at by someone else, sooner or later. And the equations are never the hard part -- it's the control flow.
Ok, now I see where the confusion is coming from. Fortran is used pretty much exclusively for numerical software. A lot of numerical software has very simple control flow using very few and very simple types. Numbers haven't changed much since they were invented. Fortran is used very differently than you're imagining.
...by people who have a reason to look at it.
What is it about Fortran’s control flow that makes you think it’s particularly hard to read? Say, harder than Python? Note that people don’t generally use computed GOTOs any more.