I have been hearing about the death of Cobol and Fortran since I started university in the 80s. Cobol is what business runs. Fortran is for engineering.

My aunt retired from Oppenheimer a few years ago. She spent her entire career programming in Cobol all the while hearing how Cobol was dead.

The engineering company I run for 25+ years just kicked off a new Fortran-based project on Tuesday to update a mission critical system for a $100+ billion/year company. They obviously could afford to port the software, but of course we won’t. It works very well and is very fast. It has been debugged literally for decades so the application is rock-fucking-solid. We use a brand new Fortran compiler that works with the latest version of Visual Studio. Porting it to another language would mean adding a huge amount of cost and risk, and for what gain? How buggy is a new version of any major application?

Instead of porting everything, the smarter thing to do is what we do, build a new front end for visualization tools that didn’t exist years ago, and keep the hugely valuable computational back end engines in the language they were developed in. We’ve been doing this for going on two decades as GUIs have modernized — all the while hearing the same basic thing my aunt heard for 40 years — Fortran is dead.

Yeah, yeah. Cobol is dead. Fortran is dead. Long live Cobol and Fortran.