In 1980 I was attending Colorado State University as a mechanical engineering student. I was taking a thermodynamics class and we wrote Fortran programs on punch cards to do finite-element analyses of heat transfer in metal parts. I thought Fortran would be long gone by now but it recently made its way back on the TIOBE Programming Community index, an "indicator of the popularity of programming languages."
From ZDNet:
Another notable change is the re-emergence of Fortran in the index at 20th position, up from 34th spot a year ago. Fortran, which emerged from IBM in the 1950s, remains popular in scientific computing. Its highest ranking on Tiobe's index was 10th in 2002.
"This dinosaur is back in the top 20 after more than 10 years. Fortran was the first commercial programming language ever, and is gaining popularity thanks to the massive need for (scientific) number crunching. Welcome back Fortran," says Tiobe.
It also surprised me to to see Visual Basic and Classic Visual Basic on the list!
Image: Wikipedia / Arnold Reinhold. CC BY-SA 2.5
