Chemical engineer how useful would FORTRAN be

[omagdon7]

As a chemical engineer how useful would FORTRAN be to me. It is listed on the University of Florida's ChemE homepage as a good language, but I have heard it is on its way out.

All Comments Welcome

 

[dlgoff]

I saw your post and just had to reply. I'm not a programmer but I learned fortran way back before there were PCs. I was an engineering student and took the math department course (there was no computer science department then) called Intorduction to Computing. I kept the text for old times sake. It even has a key punch card as a bookmarker (lol).

Anyway to answer your question. In my opinion, if you know BASIC there is no point. There may be a few differences but basically it's structured the same. A high level language.

Regards
Don

 

[Brad Barker]

As a chemical engineer how useful would FORTRAN be to me. It is listed on the University of Florida's ChemE homepage as a good language, but I have heard it is on its way out.

All Comments Welcome

yeah, that's what i keep on hearing, too.

but, for instance, my friend is doing an REU at u-chicago right now. and she had to use fortran to ...do something particle physics-y.

the advice that i got from my undergrad physics adviser is that it's easy to learn fortran once you have learned c++ but the opposite is not necessarily true.

 

[HallsofIvy]

FORTRAN has been on its way out for more years than I can count!

It is still used because so many of the first large math/engineering packages were written in FORTRAN. Actually most C++ compilers (For example. Same for Ada, etc.) allow C++ programs to call FORTRAN subroutines but it is still a good idea to know basic FORTRAN so you will understand the function calling format.

 

[PerennialII]

... and it seems that the later releases are still used, developed and going to be used to such extent that I'm starting to think whether it'll die at all.

 

[cscott]

Isn't C gaining popularity? It's probably best to learn both, althought I don't know much about chemical engineering.