The skills gap for Fortran looms large in HPC
Fortran was old in the early 1980s, when I first taught it to myself for use on a research project.  I&#x27;d taught myself BASIC, x86 assembler, and APL (for another physics course) by then.  All the serious physicists were using Fortran though, for all their simulations.<p>My research project required use of the university mainframe for the big calculations, the 1000x1000 Markov matrices I was working on.  I taught myself how to work on out-of-core code then as well, as well as exploiting symmetries inherent in my models.<p>My Ph.D. code was all written in Fortran, with a little Perl thrown in for good luck.  30+ years later, all of it works without a problem on my laptop&#x2F;desktop machines.<p>I learned C in 1996 and C++ in 1997.  The C code I wrote still works, though the C++ code needs special compilation options to be able to work.<p>I&#x27;ve not used Fortran in maybe 15 years now.  I&#x27;m not up on the modern bits, I stopped using it professionally as F90 was becoming a thing.<p>I taught graduate HPC programming courses at my alma mater in the CS department, and gave the choice of Fortran or C to the kids.  They blanched at the thought of using a nearly (at the time) 60 year old language.  They correctly reasoned that learning the language would not help their employability.<p>Today, I use Julia for heavy computation.  Python as a glue language, and C++ when required.  I read the report, and I disagreed with the conclusions for a number of reasons, but what it comes down to is that many research groups in Physics&#x2F;Chem still use Fortran, and aren&#x27;t about to do the port to C&#x2F;C++ due to funding.  You can&#x27;t get funding for this conversion.  So codes will go on, students will learn what they need, and profs will keep publishing papers.<p>Moreover, this isn&#x27;t the first, second, etc. time that people have predicted the death of Fortran.  I heard this in 1990s as I was finishing up my Ph.D in theoretical&#x2F;computational physics.<p>In 20 years or so, after I have (hopefully) retired, I&#x27;d bet that Fortran is still in widespread use, with Python following Java down the path to legacy.  And the newer HPC language(s) will be quite happy to talk to Fortran.<p>I could be wrong, and I&#x27;m ok with it.   But I doubt it.