
Ask HN: Jobs for young/old FORTRAN programmers? - CoreSet
I&#x27;m actually a Node&#x2F;full-stack JS guy myself (I know, ick) but my father, a now-retired environmental scientist and former civil servant, coded in FORTRAN every workday for 20+ years.<p>Now I&#x27;m looking to spend more time with him, generally, and thought it&#x27;d be fun to go through some of his old materials&#x2F;documentation and learn a little bit of the language myself. I figure it&#x27;d be a neat way for me to get more insight into his former day-to-day work than I ever did growing up (just recently started coding) while getting some exposure to CS history in the process.<p>My question: Is there any sort of market for FORTRAN programmers anymore? I&#x27;ve heard of COBOL programmers fetching pretty good prices because so many legacy applications depend on it and there&#x27;s a dearth of new talent - does a similar situation exist for FORTRAN?<p>If not, that&#x27;s OK, just already dreaming about a family business refactoring legacy code! &quot;LastName &amp; Sons Software Development&quot; has a nice ring to it ;)
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akg_67
I got my professional start as FORTRAN programmer for process control systems
and simulations for Petrochemical, Oil & Gas, Food & Beverage, and Nuclear
industry. /u/kjs3 answer provides direction on where to look for FORTRAN
opportunities.

I believe environmental science, fluid dynamics, aerospace, nuclear, and
geology still uses a lot of FORTRAN based back-end. Most of FORTRAN is tough
to replace as, other than C, I haven't seen any language that can provide the
scientific/mathematical computing libraries, for example numerical methods,
that FORTRAN has.

Instead of thinking of refactoring legacy FORTRAN code, think of putting a new
user/web interface in front of FORTRAN. There may be better opportunities on
updating the 'user interaction' with FORTRAN based systems specially in
simulations arena.

I don't think the FORTRAN comp will be anywhere close to COBOL comp. With
FORTRAN, you are dealing with typically misson-critical applications rather
than COBOL based business applications so there is much higher resistance and
lower opportunity to show direct revenue/profit impact. A few times, I have
been approached by vendors who have been trying to replace the FORTRAN based
systems, I worked on, with their C based products. These vendors typically
have balked on my contract rate expectations, that I get doing big data
analytics.

Why not ask you dad for the FORTRAN based systems he used and talk to his
industry connections for getting the feel for the demand. Your dad most
probably will get lot more kick out of you trying to understand what he did.
When I was working on a facility very similar to the one my dad used to work,
he really got the kick out of understanding how things are changing.

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dirtyaura
I used to do watershed modelling with Fortran back in the late 90s. There's
definitely a lot of legacy Fortran software still in use, but more in research
and science oriented fields. I think there are still interesting opportunities
in which you interface modern web UIs with a legacy Fortran implementations
that do some cool scientific modelling.

You are unlikely to make as good money as Cobol programmers, though.

~~~
CoreSet
My father worked as a hydrologist doing very similar work!

It's funny, when I first heard him tell me he used Fortran, I immediately
thought "typical slow-to-change state government!" etc etc. Only subsequently
did I realize how prevalent (and useful) the language is for scientific
research, advanced computing, engineering, and a bunch of other services -
basically the exact purposes he was using it for.

Nice to see some longevity after learning so many things that seem more fad-
ish!

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jlkjr
Computational chemistry (mostly pharma/biotech companies) employs a lot of
FORTRAN codes (quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, monte carlo, etc.). The
2-3 codes I've spent time understanding are examples of text book bad
programming practices though (not to say there aren't some good ones). Also if
you don't mind your input files being 80-column punch card formats.

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zwiteof
There's plenty of engineering software that's written in Fortran (plenty of
F77 code still around and in use too).

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cozzyd
FORTRAN is still heavily used in high energy physics, although it's not a
field known for being lucrative.

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eps
I have nothing constructive to say, but ... what a cool question :)

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kjs3
There's a _lot_ of old FORTRAN code out there. Off the top of my head I'd look
for:

\- Places using traditional supercomputers (Cray, NEC SX, Fujitsu) \-
Geophysical and petrochemical industries \- Defense industries \- Academic
institutions in hard science (physics, mathematics)

Good luck to you guys.

