EclecticLip

A colleague told me recently that FORTRAN still finds strong use in academia — outside of computer sciences, that is.  (I can only attest that FORTRAN was being used by chemical engineering professors in the late 1990’s at UBC.)

Evidently, FORTRAN was the language that computer-savvy professors in the 1960’s and 1970’s used for their work.  In the 1980’s and 1990’s, enough young professors building on their predecessors’ work, found it easiest to continue using FORTRAN.  With the result that FORTRAN still finds considerable use in academic circles.  Or, so says my anonymous source with the unverified information. 

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If true, there would be strong parallels with Latin and Sanskrit.  (Technically the closest parallel might be Proto-Indo-European, but franky, “FORTRAN - the Proto-Indo-European of computer languages” sounds ridiculous.)

Latin and Sanskrit were languages that survived in academic / “elite” circles, long after they had been supplanted by a myriad of vernacular languages in everyday use.  And outside academia, FORTRAN must have the programming-language-equivalent market share of, like, the Opera browser.  Or Netscape Navigator (I remember when you were cool!).  See Wiki here.