On: Show HN: A minimal Fortran TCP client and server

[pm90]

Many of the libraries used by popular Data Science/Vis tools today (Matlab, Numpy etc) use BLAS and LAPACK which are written in FORTRAN

[alexhutcheson → pm90]

BLAS now has a number of non-Fortran implementations, inlcuding ATLAS[1] (C) and and Eigen[2] (C++). LAPACK is still Fortran-only, although many libraries (including the two mentioned above) implement a subset of LAPACK in other languages.

[1] http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/

[2] https://bitbucket.org/eigen/eigen/src/default/Eigen/src/misc...

[Annatar → pm90]

Yes, for performance. If you need something to be fast and yet portable, Fortran is still the #1 language of choice, especially in supercomputing and finite element analysis fields.

[lordgrenville → pm90]

Plus on the topic of Data Science, R is written in a mixture of FORTRAN and C!

[Annatar → lordgrenville]

Yes, the core of R is written in Fortran because short of writing assembler code by hand, Fortran compilers generate the fastest machine code.