Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list (opens in new tab)

I can't say for sure the reason, but I can say with confidence the use of Fortran never really went out of style, but many of the uses were confined to classified systems and edge type or disconnected systems. Heavy number crunching is a big deal in applications like satellite imagery processing, signals surveillance, targeting and navigation. Fortran never really stopped being king there, but a lot of the development wasn't exactly taking place on engineer's personal laptops or Internet connected systems at all, so queries for how to do stuff wasn't being captured by Tiobe metrics.

The U.S. government has been making a huge push in the past decade to downgrade as much code as possible that doesn't need to be classified and push as much development as possible into fully unclassified environments to mitigate the cost of needing a fully cleared workforce. And network connectivity is generally increasing for systems that were not networked in the past.

Trends like these could easily account for Fortran developers doing more work in the open where they can just use Google to get answers instead of checking proprietary and closed information sources.

As I understand it, the TIOBE index is calculated based on search engine rankings. What I believe helped Fortran's ranking was our hard work on its web presence [1] (started April 2020), modern tooling [2] (started December 2019), and community building [3] (started May 2020).

[1] https://fortran-lang.org/

[2] https://github.com/fortran-lang/

[3] https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/

There's been some great, recent efforts to bring more "modern amenities" to the Fortran coding experience. For instance the Fortran Package Manager [1] aims to make it easier to bootstrap new applications leaning on established, extant code without spending all your time manually setting up the build targets and library linking details.

I've also seen a confluence with the AI/ML communities. Some interesting applications of these tools to accelerate models used in weather, climate, chemistry, physics, and astrophysics require complex software interactions, usually running simultaneously with some multi-million line Fortran code base. There's been many interesting and clever marriages of classic HPC Fortran applications and novel, embedded AI/ML parameterizations.

[1]: https://fpm.fortran-lang.org/

Maybe Intel making its Fortran compilers for Windows and Linux has helped. Fortran Discourse https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/ is a recent, active discussion site, and Fortran-lang https://fortran-lang.org/ is a recent information hub. On GitHub the Fortran Programming Language group https://github.com/fortran-lang is active, creating a Fortran standard library and package manager.

That said, although I'm a Fortran fan and programmer I doubt its relative popularity has truly jumped so much in 1 year.

I do know that FORTRAN is considered the fastest scientific computing language; beating out C++.

I'm told that is because the standard libraries are so optimized.

Also, there is a gigantic infrastructure of literature, algorithms and support for the language. It is also relatively easy for folks that don't code for a living to use.

I wouldn't know, from experience. The last time I had anything to do with FORTRAN was in 1987, and I don't miss it one bit.

took over a project that calculates the inbreeding-coefficient[1] on a platform for animal breeders. The product is used by breeding organization of endangered livestock (an Alpaca club in Ireland, a horse breeder in Belgium etc etc). My first reaction was WTF who decided on this technology. It was developed with some university professors focusing in veterinary geneology and so weren't aware that this isn't the right choice. When I asked them they were dead set on using this because apparently in their domain it is considered the go-to language for number-crunching. Idk if this is anecdotal or if there is a pattern but the feeling / takeaway I got was that some older academics would bring these things back because it's what they think is the right tool for the job. It was odd because most younger people I know who develop but don't consider themselves "developers" by trade would almost always resort to Python.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_inbreeding

> The article didn't say the reason for Fortran's renewed popularity. Anyone know why?

As a single data point, I'm more and more drawn towards Fortran lately. I never used it before this year, having done all of my work in various non-Fortran languages, mostly C, C++, Matlab/Octave, lua, python+numpy, and Julia. I'm quite fed-up with limitations with all of these languages, and it seems that Fortran has actually its shit together, at least for purely numerical computation (which is all I do and all I need).

> Fortran's renewed popularity

There's no way to know if a language is becoming more popular. You can only observe if a measure of language popularity is rising, falling, or staying the same. We're almost certainly observing the "measured" part as opposed to the "actual" part.

Really well debugged and proven numerical processing libraries like LINPACK ???.

Fortran = physics, and perhaps either civilian or military engineering.

I think it's popular in the high performance computing crowd.

An even better title would be We do not know if Fortran is getting more popular or not, because our data basis is Tiobe

I edited the title again to not confuse popularity with TIOBE ranking.

Done, thanks!

If you doing nearly anything in physics, you have to know and use Fortran. (And, in fact, modern Fortran is not a bad language -- it is something like Matlab or Numpy, but much faster).