Hi, I started learning Fortran in 2026. It’s my first programming language and I started that because it looked interesting. And Fortran is surprisingly comfy language. But I have questions… Mostly because of how useful it is. I wonder if it will be any use to find a job without PHD in science, math or CS with Fortran, or it’ll just stay only as fun hobby in that case? And if it’s possible to work without PHD and experience then in what sphere? Sorry if question pretty stupid, yeah…
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Hello @Hlora1337 welcome to the discourse.
I am very happy to see you picking up Fortran as your first language. I would also suggest you try to learn some Python or Julia so that you can get a feel for other languages and compare and contrast things like performance, libraries, etc. Sometimes the best Fortran comes after being frustrated with python for a bit!
Also learning how to interface Fortran to other languages using the iso_c_binding module can make it waaay stronger from a CV perspective. This means that you can write blazing fast Fortran and connect it to a python/julia skeleton which is super easy to type in.
Fortran is indeed heavily represented in scientific computing, like chemistry, physics, weather, computational fluid dynamics, etc. You do not need a PhD to contribute to these codes, the math helps but in the end things are code and that is simple to understand.
A lot of the people in this discourse don’t have a PhD and contribute to the overall language regularly. I believe that learning Fortran will make you stronger when you start learning other things like C/C++, etc.
If you get really good at it you can do consultancy work for large Fortran codebases, I know people that do that.
Hope this helps, feel free to ask more questions!
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Fortran is useful, but there is a lot of other things to learn in order to really solve problems on a computer.
AFAICT, Fortran (in the U.S.) is mostly used by scientists with graduate degrees and engineers with a Bachelor’s at minimum. While nothing is impossible if you know the right people, most jobs in these sectors would require a specific degree in order to pass an initial HR screen.
I think it is a mistake to view of things in terms of “X programming language” jobs, although that is common in IT.
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@jorgeg and @R_cubed already made a lot of good points. To add: You do not need a PhD for many (if not most?) of the “Fortran programmer” positions. For example, weather services will often look for a Fortran programmer with a degree in maths/comp. sc./physics/meteorology, but a PhD would overqualify you. PhDs demonstrate that you can work independently as a researcher on a project. If that’s not part of the job, you’ll likely “just” need a degree, and I imagine there’s some flexibility there if you can demonstrate your skill.
Fortran is surprisingly comfy language
I agree. I also found it more intuitive than many other languages.
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Thank you for explanation. I wanted to check something like Julia, also wondered about R or something close to it, just out of sport interest, when I’ll feel more confident in Fortran I’ll try few more things.
And I also wondered about HPC since it is kinda good for Fortran sphere (correct me if I’m wrong, want to learn and understand better), and I wonder what people need for that except C/C++, Fortran and OpenMP. If it’s even actual, since it’s from AI answers and I dunno if it’s true or just LLM hallucination.
Thank you again for spending time on my questions
You can get through most of HPC using Fortran, the only true pain in the neck is using MPI because we use modules in Fortran and they are compiler specific. Therefore, you need a specific MPI installation for each co
MPI will give you multi node parallelism while OpenMP can give you shared memory parallelism and GPU access. You can see an example on how to use GPUS here, how to use MPI.
Here some random crap I’ve written.
And here is an app written entirely in Fortran that leverages large scale MPI parallelism.
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To add to this: In some cases, the language does not matter at all; just the service you provide. For example, if you attained a geography degree and decide to become a freelance consultant who delivers products derived from satellite images (real case), your clients will not care what language you used for your analyses.
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That. I never needed to look at C/C++ and have been working (with Fortran) on HPC systems since 2012. (Though C is unquestionably a good language to look at, even if you don’t end up working with it much).
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I see. And last few questions (at least for now) are:
How long it really takes to get a real job with Fortran. Just wondering if it’s more into quick start or need a lot of time to learn everything
And how useful it is to join any seminars or conferences even if online-only?
The job question is hard, you need to build up your “street cred” a bit if you want to get something in the community. Start contributing to open source projects, make your own, attempt to fix some issues, look at the stdlib, look at lfortran, etc.
I would not bet my entire career on Fortran - find something cool to do with Fortran and things will start finding you.
I can help with chemistry and a bit of climate.
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There are a few posts on this discourse with suggestions on how to get started with that. Most recently this one.
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