Fortran is back on the top 20 TIOBE index list
Title is clickbait, suggest it be changed to something like Fortran is getting more popular.
I was surprised to find Fortran has continued to get regular upgrades every 5-10 years.
some interesting ones:
1995: "Initialization of pointers to NULL()"
2003: "Object-oriented programming support: type extension and inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic type allocation, and type-bound procedures, providing complete support for abstract data types"
2008: "Coarray Fortran—a parallel execution model"
2008: "The DO CONCURRENT construct—for loop iterations with no interdependencies"
2018: "Further Interoperability with C"
I find TIOBE's ranking to be the least helpful and most volatile of any of the language popularity measurements out there. A couple years ago, the Julia language team did a pretty good deep dive on just why that is.
The article didn't say the reason for Fortran's renewed popularity. Anyone know why? Only thing I can think of is either due to AI/ML or robotic-y needs.
Makes sense... Because in the part (at least) in which it remains a "formula translator" Fortran cannot be beat by any other language in terms of the efficiency of the generated machine code.
It has been a few years, but less than 10 years ago I worked on a small project where we used the Intel FORTRAN Compiler: https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/o...
It's well maintained and highly optimized. Before then, I had not used FORTRAN since 1983 (and it was old even then).
What is going on with Java down -5.49% though?
"Stack Overflow Trends" lets you search for number of questions by tag. I personally think this is a more robust indicator of language popularity than TIOBE's method. Here are the results for Objective C vs Fortran. As you can see, by this definition, Objective C is at least twice as popular as Fortran.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=objective-c%2...