fxm 286 It took only 2 prompts to translate my associations to an image (though I am unhappy with the F here).
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This video explains well why Fortran is still around.
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Documenting the many pronunciations of Fortran employed by the AI narrator
- fur-TRAWN
- FOR-tron
- Fortran
- FOR-TRAN
- For-Tron
- for-TRAN
- for-TRON
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June 2026: 17, 0.95%
First time below 1% since June 2023 it seems.
TIOBE Index - TIOBE 2 Likes
certik 291 Once it drops out of top 20, then TIOBE will again not be very relevant or accurate, as people have been saying.
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@CRquantum Yeah, that was quite something earlier this morning when adding the current reading (1.22% in April → corresponding to place 13, 1.22% in May → place 11, 0.95% in June → place 17) to the table (entry 86 to this thread) and the ASCII/csv table. While returning my cup to the shelf, I briefly thought if the kurtosis and skewness of this distribution changed over the time (the .csv links to the corresponding snapshots stored on archive.org) which however wasn’t followed through in favour of «other things™».
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Fortran is down to 19th place in the Jul 2026 list. Since the silly index is now trending down for Fortran we can go back to defending the language on its merits
I have spent much time working on transpilers from Python and R to Fortran. If you have code in Python and especially R, because of their dynamic nature, you only know for sure what Python or R code is doing if you run it. A transpiler must play detective guessing the type and rank of variables and function results. If you introduce an inference rule to make more Python or R codes to translate to Fortran code, it may break other codes that transpile. With modern Fortran, not only can your code be orders of magnitude faster than Python or R, you can infer what it does by looking at it. Fortran is less flexible and more verbose than dynamic languages, but LLMs will be writing an increasing share of code anyway. Once you have an algorithm coded in Fortran, C, or C++ code that can be given a C interface, you effectively have the algorithm in every language using its foreign function interface.
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certik 294 Last month of TIOBE being correct!
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vmagnin 295 In August index, Fortran is back to rank #15 with a 0.99% rating. Below 1%, we can expect the ranking to have a great volatility.
What interested me in the editor’s comments is about MATLAB:
In a world where most programming languages are freely available, having to pay for a MATLAB license is becoming an increasingly significant disadvantage.
Indeed, I have used GNU Octave during the Covid, and I am now using Scilab (GNU GPLv2) to work with a colleague. An interesting and rich language and IDE, but interpreted.
2 Likes