this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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Isn't it more COBOL than FORTRAN in terms of getting paid?
I thought FORTRAN was pretty much exclusively used via SciPy in research & academia these days.
COBOL is still powering the world economy on mainframes
Coming from research: no, Fortran is very much alive as is. Plenty software is still actively developed in Fortran, I do believe in recent years there's been a push towards C++, but I'm unsure how much that progressed.
Oh that's cool to hear, I was under the impression in research that whilst a lot of the processing actually happens in FORTRAN-written code, it was nearly always reusing already-written functions and primitives in a higher level language (such as python, via the aforementioned SciPy). And then those libraries being maintained by a handful of wizards on the internet somewhere.
Can you elaborate on the kind of research where people are still actively writing directly in FORTRAN? Did people typically arrive with the skills already or was there training for learning how to write it well?
Someone else using fortran in research checking in. In particle physics, were basically writing huge, physics heavy Markov chain monte Carlos in it. Just one example.