FYI: The post is originally taken from XJTU-Share/ENPO300103-工程分析程序设计 at master · cantjie/XJTU-Share · GitHub verbatim.
ENPO300103-工程分析程序设计
- 能动专业课程，在 2015 版培养方案中，其于大一下开课。
Attachment(s):
(1022.1KiB) 西安交通大学工程分析程序设计 Fortran 上机作业参考答案.pdf
Tell a FORTRAN joke:
FORTRAN and Trump share what in common?
CapsLock are all stuck
I thought of this two years ago the night after I finished the FORTRAN exam 
Regarding why this antique course is offered, I’ll share a rumor (I actually don’t really believe it): It is said that they originally planned to offer C or C++, but the Telecommunications College had a poor relationship with the Energy Dynamics College leadership, so Energy Dynamics decided to open a course on its own. However, at that time the teachers in Energy Dynamics didn’t know those two languages, only FORTRAN, so a FORTRAN course was passed down three generations.
I’m skeptical of this story, because as far as I know many old computational thermophysical software use FORTRAN. I think the reason Energy Dynamics insists on teaching FORTRAN is to ensure research continuity, so they passed it down.
That said, there must be computer‑science students seeing this post; I’ve previously seen a claim: not updating outdated “shit‑mountain” programs will only hinder research because the programming language is too old, so research should frequently update code. I wonder what computer‑science students think about this?
If this post gets more than 5 upvotes, I’ll start a new thread to discuss this issue (I won’t put the discussion in the academic section).
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There’s an interesting story: a week or two ago, while taking a course in the School of Electrical Engineering and discussing a numerical heat‑transfer assignment with classmates, the numerical‑methods teacher mentioned in class that the large project program is best written in Fortran, and apparently most assignments are also said to be written in Fortran. The electrical‑engineering professor who taught us was shocked: “What Fortran? You want to write the big project in Fortran? Thirty years ago when I was here I heard you could use Fortran to write things, and now you’re still using Fortran?”
We were momentarily speechless; indeed it’s a very outdated thing, and as ordinary students we have no way to push for change. Perhaps the technical level hasn’t progressed to the point where the Fortran language hinders research? At least in graduate studies, Fortran as a direct tool to interact with legacy code is still somewhat useful, hmm.
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Uninvited, a senior student, I had never studied FORTRAN before, but this semester a major project in a course requires FORTRAN. The teacher’s example needs some condition changes (not just simple parameter tweaks). I tried four major models from both domestic and overseas, and I found that FORTRAN is a language that even LLMs can’t understand 
. I don’t know if it’s because my prompt skills are lacking? In the end I was forced to actually understand the code to finish the task.
Also, after seeing FORTRAN code, I decided that whenever I mention FORTRAN I will always keep it in uppercase and insist on writing the full name: these seven uppercase letters have the same visual impact as the FORTRAN code does for me, and even so I can’t convey, as a 21st‑century youngster, how difficult the old‑school FORTRAN code is.
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I’ve recently been working on a project with code. My coding ability is actually a big lump, but LLM + Python is such a handy tool that the client is fairly satisfied with what I produce, and I feel a sense of achievement. Does FORTRAN even understand LLM? I’m intimidated; I originally thought I could also use LLM for this big assignment, but if LLM can’t help me, I’m really out of options 
Although theoretically I studied FORTRAN in undergrad, the problem is I rarely use it, and who actually knows how to use it? My coding skills can’t be exercised (unless my research direction is algorithms and I have to refine the legacy code passed down by seniors 
), leading to visibly disastrous experiences every time I encounter it.
In the end, it’s just too old and not suited to the times. Maybe in the past it was considered a precise and rigorous language, but now without LLM its development efficiency is lower than other languages like Python. I do little coding work; if my view is wrong, feel free to discuss, light criticism () LLM is just so useful.
At the time, my prompting method was: put the main program code in, put the user subroutine in, and ask it to tell me what the code does to see if it can understand (at least, from what I recall, the LLM didn’t get it; the problem model was just a simple 2‑D plate‑to‑plate convection heat‑transfer calculation of Nu), or just have it edit the code for me. Then a few large models went all out like the “Eight Immortals crossing the sea” In the end I figured it out myself by looking at the big models, trial‑and‑error, and got the code half‑understood and solved it on my own.
————
anyway, this is probably the only intersection I’ll ever have with FORTRAN in my life. I won’t use FORTRAN again, and after switching to coding in graduate school I won’t really deal with it either. I can understand that FORTRAN had real value in the early days of computer programming development; maybe back then it was as trendy as Python or C++ is now, but I can’t seem to find its place in the modern world. I sometimes fantasize about a “miracle programmer” who would take those orally‑transmitted FORTRAN programs and rewrite them in a new language—whether Python, or even C++—and completely phase them out. Of course, I’ll probably just have a mental thrill about it unless someone actually creates a replacement for those legacy codes. In the foreseeable future, FORTRAN will still be a hurdle that students can’t easily bypass.
As for curricula and course design, thinking about how many of our undergraduate courses weren’t really designed for the students makes me resign myself to a lot of things. I can understand it, but I truly don’t respect it.
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