What are your favorite and least favorite things about Fortran?

Favorite:

  1. Its simplicity, you can teach programming 101 with Fortran and within a week to cover everything. While an experienced programmer could take up Fortran and start writing production-level code within a couple of days.
  2. Multidimensional array handling and the many intrinsic related functions.
  3. Off the self optimized compilers. Just understand what is row- vs column-major and what is the correct order in loops and for most of the people is all they will ever need to write optimized (speed-wise) code.

Least favorite:

  1. Lack of a complete, well-documented, easy-to-use (OS independent), package manager.
  2. Lack of templates.
  3. I hate the percentage ‘%’ symbol for OOP. The dot ‘.’ symbol is much more intuitive as well as faster to type.
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