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Comment on What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

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Scaring baby programmers.

Oh, and lots of scientific computing is done in Fortran - eg. the sorts of work my brother does on atomic structure as a computational chemist at ITU, running on grid or supercomputers.

On the flip side, there's lots of very large, poorly documented programs which are effectively "mission critical" Fortran. Until someone ponies up a LOT of money to re-write and revalidate them, Fortran ain't going away.

My first programming experience was with FORTRAN (for a task that did not require any sort of high performance computing), and this scared me away from programming for six years. I realize the language isn't really to blame, but I'm definitely a little bitter.

And the main use of Python is scaring fogey programmers?

Python's main utility is finding who amongst your coworkers is incapable of giving attention to whitespace.

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