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from the it's-called-FORmula-TRANslator-for-a-reason dept.
While it may not be widely appreciated, the Fortran programming language is still a thing. Last year, NASA ended up being overwhelmed by the sheer number of responses to their contest to optimize a Navier-Stokes equations solver used to model aerodynamics, to be evaluated on the Pleiades supercomputer. Fastest implmentation would have won the first prize, however there were far too many to evaluate. Fortran is quite old but neither outdated nor complex and nothing beats it for number crunching. So in many cases it is still the right tool for the job.
Many thought that the competition will never start due to the lack of applicants. In fact, it was cancelled for the exact opposite reason.
Quoting NASA's Press Release: «The extremely high number of applicants, more than 1,800, coupled with the difficulty in satisfying the extensive vetting requirements to control the public distribution of the software made it unlikely we would achieve the challenge's original objectives in a timely manner.»
Next up, MUMPS?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29 2018, @01:46AM
The last version called "FORTRAN" is FORTRAN 77 (circa, you guessed it, 1977). I expect the number of people still writing programs for FORTRAN 77 is approximately zero.
When the ANSI standardization process was finally done in 1990, the language was called simply "Fortran". This edition added support for incredible features such as identifiers longer than 6 characters, and an altered syntax which is compatible with normal text editors (the syntax of earlier versions is heavily geared towards writing programs with card punchers).