Saying fortran is not legible is not an argument that holds water against fortran 90. I don't want to be uncharitable but I don't know how anyone can have this opinion unless they just don't have much familiarity with it.

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patagurbon 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I didn’t say it was illegible. I said legibility is paramount, and I don’t think it makes the right trade offs in that regard to be a great teaching language

It’s far more legible for numerics than a lot of languages, maybe except Julia and Chapel. Julia was just driven in large part by teaching mathematics at mit and I think that shows

	▲	mastermage 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I would go and say Fortran is pretty legible because it only has a handful of builtin keywords and none of the fancy stuff alot of other languages have. Julia has the fancy stuff aswell as being very legible and also having a nice REPL for instant feedback which is usefull for people learning (as well as multiple notebook implementations Pluto.jl or Jupyter) Chapel has even more of the fancy stuff like multiple loop types for different kinds of parallelism which is just wildly cool.

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jcranmer 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A large share of the illegibility of Fortran code is actually just the aversion of numerics code to having meaningful variable names.

	▲	atrettel 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I second this. When I worked on some older Fortran codes, I had to keep a cheat sheet for the variable names and what they meant or controlled. It definitely made the code hard to read.

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kjs3 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Regrettably, any discussion of Fortran will be quickly filled with people who once had to write a couple of F77 programs in college and never got over it, never used a really nice Fortran compiler, and of the very few who actually knew the language has evolved in the last 50 years the vast majority of that minority couldn't name a single significant thing that changed in F90/F95 through Fortran 2018.

But they all have Opinions, which they are compelled to share.

	▲	adastra22 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		C++ has evolved immensely in that same time. I still would NEVER use C++ for anything new, now that Rust exists. Why should I use Fortran, for anything that isn't maintaining legacy code?