Fortran
Very recently, Los Alamos National Lab published a report <i>An evaluation of risks associated with relying on Fortran for mission critical codes for the next 15 years</i> [1]. In their summary, they write:<p>&lt;quote&gt;
Our assessment for seven distinct risks associated with continued use of Fortran are that in the next fifteen years:<p>1. It is <i>very likely</i> that we will be unable to staff Fortran projects with top-rate computer scientists and computer engineers.<p>2. There is an even chance that we will be unable to staff Fortran projects with top-rate computational scientists and physicists.<p>3. There is an even chance continued maintenance of Fortran codes will lead to expensive human or financial maintenance costs.<p>4. It is <i>very unlikely</i> that codes that rely on Fortran will have poor performance on future CPU technologies.<p>5. It is <i>likely</i> that codes that rely on Fortran will have poor performance for GPU technologies.<p>6. It is <i>very likely</i> that Fortran will preclude effective use of important advances in computing technology.<p>7. There is an even chance that Fortran will inhibit introduction of new features or physics that can be introduced with other languages.
&lt;&#x2F;quote&gt;<p>In my view, a language is destined for being a &quot;maintenance language&quot; if all of these are simultaneously true:<p>1. There is a dearth of people who know the language well.<p>2. Few people are opting to learn it in their free time, and&#x2F;or seek it out for a job.<p>3. Companies do not seriously invest in training in learning the language.<p>4. Companies don&#x27;t pay enough to convince an engineer to use it. who otherwise loves using other languages and has better prospects with them.<p>I&#x27;ve experienced unique challenges in hiring Lisp programmers, but the fact it remains sufficiently interesting to enough software engineers (who are usually good programmers) has been a boon, and likewise providing space to learn it helps even more.<p>Fortran though is teetering on its historical significance and prevalence in HPC. Aside from the plethora of existing and typically inscrutable scientific code, I&#x27;m not sure what the big iron imperative language offers over the dozens of other superficially similar choices these days, except beaten-path HPC integration. Scientists are more and more writing their code in C++ and Python—definitively more complicated than Fortran but still regarded as premier languages for superlative efficiency and flexibility respectively. Julia has had a few moments, but (anecdotally) it doesn&#x27;t seem to have taken off with a quorum of hardcore scientist-programmers.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;permalink.lanl.gov&#x2F;object&#x2F;tr?what=info:lanl-repo&#x2F;lareport&#x2F;LA-UR-23-23992" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;permalink.lanl.gov&#x2F;object&#x2F;tr?what=info:lanl-repo&#x2F;lar...</a>