LANL Report - Looming Fortran Talent Scarcity is Threatening
HPCWire, Monday, May 1,2023
A new report from Los Alamos National Lab sounds alarms over the declining number of Fortran programmers, the shrinking number of efforts to teach Fortran, and the reduced appetite of scientists and developers to learn Fortran.
Developed by IBM in the mid 1950s, Fortran was a foundational programming language for scientific computing. In recent years it has been largely overtaken by modern programming languages such C++ and Python.
This latest report (An evaluation of risks associated with relying on Fortran for mission critical codes for the next 15 years) paints worrisome picture.
'We judge it is very likely that we will be unable to staff Fortran projects with top-rate computer scientists and computer engineers, and that there is an even chance we will be unable to staff Fortran projects with top-rate computational scientists and physicists,' write the LANL researchers, Galen Shipman and Timothy Randles.