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copied!<h2>Yes, in 1980; in 2008? depends</h2> <p>When I started programming professionally the speed dominance of Fortran was just being challenged. I remember <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090401205830/http://ubiety.uwaterloo.ca/~tveldhui/papers/DrDobbs2/drdobbs2.html" rel="noreferrer">reading about it in Dr. Dobbs</a> and telling the older programmers about the article--they laughed.</p> <p>So I have two views about this, theoretical and practical. <em>In theory</em> Fortran today has no intrinsic advantage to C/C++ or even any language that allows assembly code. <em>In practice</em> Fortran today still enjoys the benefits of legacy of a history and culture built around optimization of numerical code.</p> <p>Up until and including Fortran 77, language design considerations had optimization as a main focus. Due to the state of compiler theory and technology, this often meant <em>restricting</em> features and capability in order to give the compiler the best shot at optimizing the code. A good analogy is to think of Fortran 77 as a professional race car that sacrifices features for speed. These days compilers have gotten better across all languages and features for programmer productivity are more valued. However, there are still places where the people are mainly concerned with speed in scientific computing; these people most likely have inherited code, training and culture from people who themselves were Fortran programmers.</p> <p>When one starts talking about optimization of code there are many issues and the best way to get a feel for this is <a href="http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=169974" rel="noreferrer">to lurk where people are whose job it is to have fast numerical code</a>. But keep in mind that such critically sensitive code is usually a small fraction of the overall lines of code and very specialized: A lot of Fortran code is just as "inefficient" as a lot of other code in other languages and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimization_%28computer_science%29#When_to_optimize" rel="noreferrer">optimization should not even be a primary concern of such code</a>.</p> <p>A wonderful place to start in learning about the history and culture of Fortran is wikipedia. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran" rel="noreferrer">The Fortran Wikipedia entry</a> is superb and I very much appreciate those who have taken the time and effort to make it of value for the Fortran community.</p> <p>(A shortened version of this answer would have been a comment in the excellent thread started by <strong>Nils</strong> but I don't have the karma to do that. Actually, I probably wouldn't have written anything at all but for that this thread has actual information content and sharing as opposed to flame wars and language bigotry, which is my main experience with this subject. I was overwhelmed and had to share the love.)</p>

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