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| | Ask HN: Jobs for young/old FORTRAN programmers? | |
15 points by CoreSet 1044 days ago | hide | past | web | favorite | 8 comments |
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| I'm actually a Node/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. Now I'm looking to spend more time with him, generally, and thought it'd be fun to go through some of his old materials/documentation and learn a little bit of the language myself. I figure it'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. My question: Is there any sort of market for FORTRAN programmers anymore? I've heard of COBOL programmers fetching pretty good prices because so many legacy applications depend on it and there's a dearth of new talent - does a similar situation exist for FORTRAN? If not, that's OK, just already dreaming about a family business refactoring legacy code! "LastName & Sons Software Development" has a nice ring to it ;) |
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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.