Opinion: Should Fortran be taught to undergraduates?

• It is very good at what it does.
• There are millions of lines of legacy code still being used in the wild. If you end up doing research in subjects such as chemistry, physics, or engineering then you will almost certainly bump into Fortran code.
• A beginner’s course in Fortran has been part of the staple diet in degrees in physics, chemistry, and various engineering disciplines (among others) for decades.
• It constantly reinvents itself to include new features. Croucher was taught Fortran 77 (despite it being 1997) but you can now also have your pick of Fortran 90, 95, 2003, and soon 2008.

“Almost everyone I knew hated that 1997 Fortran course and the reasons for the hatred essentially boiled down to one of two points depending on your past experience,” he says.

• Fortran was too hard! So much work for such small gains. (First-time programmers)
• The course was far too easy. It was just a matter of learning Fortran syntax and blitzing through the exercises. (people with prior experience)

The course was followed by a numerical methods course which culminated in a set of projects that had to be solved in Fortran. People hated the follow-on course for one of two reasons

• They didn’t have a clue what was going on in the first course and now they were completely lost.
• The problems given were very dull and could be solved too easily. In Excel! Fortran was then used to pass the course.

Croucher continues, “Fast forward to 2009 and I see that Fortran is still being taught to many undergraduates all over the world as their first ever introduction to programming.""Students can solve problems infinitely more complicated then the ones I was faced with in even my most advanced Fortran courses with just a couple of lines of code using Mathematica , Maple, or MATLAB .""Which suggests why learn Fortran at all? And would another language such as Python be a better fit for students?” Related Link Walking Randomly