[COFF] How much Fortran?

[lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Mon, Feb 03, 2020 at 10:53:22AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 2, 2020 at 10:47 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > How big was it 30 years ago?  In my opinion, tiny compared to C.
> >
> Be careful, Fortran use is still not tiny (it has always paid my salary,
> and continues to do so).  

Fair enough. I should have said "in my world...".  I learned Fortran
enough to do some work for my dad, learned about accumulated errors
(that's actually pretty fascinating), learned the C/Fortran bindings
because I wrote a user space threads library that could be used from
Fortran, so I was aware of it.

But in the CS department and then later at Sun, everything I came
in contact with was in C.  So in my world it wasn't a thing.

I knew it had a pretty active user base, my buddy Bill Long is on
the Fortran steering committee (or whatever it is called) and we'd
talk about it.  Modern Fortran is apparently a lot more pleasant 
than what I learned.