FORTRAN
 

So I keep on having professor recommend that I should learn fortran at some point. I've got a pretty decent background in Visual Basic, C++, and Java, so could anyone give me a guess as to how hard it would be to teach myself? I'd mostly want it for plotting funky-ass functions and modelling systems. I've used Maple to this point, but it was a hassle and a half for my last assignment, so I'm curious to see if this might be an alternative I could persue.

Edit: And please don't tell me just to use another language. For some reason Fortran is still wildly popular in the scientific community, so I'd also like the ability to understand code from other sources without a whole lot of trouble.

I asked my dad this question, and his first response was "Pfft, do they even USE FORTRAN anymore?"

Then, when I prodded him, he basically said that it won't be too hard to learn. Just be aware that the languages you know are, in his words, more web oriented, whereas FORTRAN focuses more on calculations. So go for it, but be aware that your experience in the prior languages won't necessarily translate well into FORTRAN.

I used plenty of Fortran back in college, and it's not too difficult. Granted, FORTRAN 90 has a lot of improvement over FORTRAN 77. Just remember that it's a much more primitive language, that is primarily used for math and engineering. You won't find much memory management, or pointers, or any object oriented concepts. It's all strictly procedural programming. In practice, you typically use the Implicit statement to declare all variables beginning with the letters i through n, as integers, and the rest as real or double.

Once I learned C++, I couldn't stand Fortran, so good luck.

( For modeling dynamic systems, I'd recommend using Matlab. )

As far as practicality goes, FORTRAN is still in the top 10 for important languages still in use. It would certainly be a useful language for you to learn, and, from what I hear, it's not too challenging and it is fairly dry.

Your Java and VB experiences won't help you learn FORTRAN, but if you learned C++ the right way, you shouldn't have too much of a problem teaching yourself.

FORTRAN is a good language to learn because it teaches good programming habits. I'm not really sure if it is used much today as it is somewhat out-dated. Like BlueMikey said, if you learned C++ the right way (i.e know why lines of code do what they do), you shouldn't have a problem teaching yourself it.

Before C++ (and, ultimately, Java) FORTRAN was the teaching language. The first AP tests in computer science were in FORTRAN. It's not used much today in new programs outside of the academic world or places that are using other antiquated systems, but it is still interesting nonetheless.

Actually, FORTRAN isn't always used on "antiquated systems". It's quite the opposite in a number of cases, it's one of the language of choice for stuff designed to run on supercomputers. The main reason for this, and likely one of the reason it is kept in academia, is that the structure used by FORTRAN allows a bit more optimization at compile time than, say, C does. For most applications you don't really care enough about the performance hit, so it's not worth it to use a less flexible language just to remove 10 instructions in a loop. However, spending an additional week on your program because of FORTRAN isn't that bad if you're going to remove a month worth of computing time on a cluster of giant machines.

It's not too hard. We had to learn it in a few days (although I did have a Math class that taught me it for a few weeks so that made it easier). A lot of the complex stuff is taken out. If anything, it will show you are versatile...