from Hacker News

Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list

by milancurcic on 4/6/21, 1:48 PM with 43 comments

  • by MaxBarraclough on 4/6/21, 2:08 PM

    Title is clickbait, suggest it be changed to something like Fortran is getting more popular.

  • by m463 on 4/6/21, 2:47 PM

    I was surprised to find Fortran has continued to get regular upgrades every 5-10 years.

    some interesting ones:

    1995: "Initialization of pointers to NULL()"

    2003: "Object-oriented programming support: type extension and inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic type allocation, and type-bound procedures, providing complete support for abstract data types"

    2008: "Coarray Fortran—a parallel execution model"

    2008: "The DO CONCURRENT construct—for loop iterations with no interdependencies"

    2018: "Further Interoperability with C"

  • by mindB on 4/6/21, 2:35 PM

    I find TIOBE's ranking to be the least helpful and most volatile of any of the language popularity measurements out there. A couple years ago, the Julia language team did a pretty good deep dive on just why that is.

    <https://juliacomputing.com/blog/2019/09/tiobe-blog/>

  • by RoyTyrell on 4/6/21, 1:54 PM

    The article didn't say the reason for Fortran's renewed popularity. Anyone know why? Only thing I can think of is either due to AI/ML or robotic-y needs.

  • by Koshkin on 4/6/21, 3:05 PM

    Makes sense... Because in the part (at least) in which it remains a "formula translator" Fortran cannot be beat by any other language in terms of the efficiency of the generated machine code.

  • by anonymousiam on 4/6/21, 3:16 PM

    It has been a few years, but less than 10 years ago I worked on a small project where we used the Intel FORTRAN Compiler: https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/o...

    It's well maintained and highly optimized. Before then, I had not used FORTRAN since 1983 (and it was old even then).

  • by pier25 on 4/6/21, 3:40 PM

    What is going on with Java down -5.49% though?

    https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

  • by jamesdhutton on 4/6/21, 2:51 PM

    "Stack Overflow Trends" lets you search for number of questions by tag. I personally think this is a more robust indicator of language popularity than TIOBE's method. Here are the results for Objective C vs Fortran. As you can see, by this definition, Objective C is at least twice as popular as Fortran.

    https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=objective-c%2...