I learned Fortran for a summer research job in college about 15 years ago. It was my first programming language and I used it to do some population modeling. I found an old Fortran book from when my dad went to school back in the early 70s and learned it from that which was a cool experience - I just had to skip over all the parts about entering your code into punch cards :D
That is awesome. I learned fortran early and it was one of the first languages I learned. So much of the first programs I wrote were about controlling something or calculating some result.
I'm close to 40, dinosaurish by HN/Reddit standards, but I learned Fortran mostly because back in the late 80s and early 90s essentially all numeric processing code was written either in Assembly or Fortran; and at a later stage, because I was the only one proficient in Fortran, I inherited lots of legacy code at work.
Most people my age, even if they've been programming since age 9, haven't seen any Fortran unless they're doing physics or using LAPACK.
Fortran, my first real language. I haven’t looked at any since 1993. I wrote whole interactive term screen engineering tools with it. I had a whole system/scheme for how I did line numbering (3xxx for formats, 2xxx for gotos, etc). Some of what I cobbled together is still being used for nuclear fuel assembly design work flow.
I have no idea which year’s flavor of Fortran is shown… are implicit variable types based on what letter the variable starts with still a thing? I notice the “real :: …” in the listing…
I thought it was kind of quaint feature as I started learning “real languages” after that. All these years later, I kinda thinks it’s clever/original now.
My first ever professional program was a source code formatter (for Jovial language) written in Fortran (77 I think). Writing a parser in Fortran (early 80's) is an exercise I am glad I never had to repeat.
Curious, do you remember the title of that Fortran book? Was it a for kids book or an actual textbook? It sounds like a great place to dive into Fortran, from what you described.
Sometimes I wish I had access to these resources 15 years ago when I was just a little kid and was wondering what a function was and why we want to have them. Yup, I started with Fortran and spaghetti code ;)
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