Choosing Software for a Critical Future

 I am inclined to think the critical future will be Lo and No-Code rather than old languages and methods. 

Code as Infrastructure

The Next Critical Talent Shortage Won’t Be Fortran  via O'Reilly and ACM

By Mike Loukides, June 8, 2021

A few months ago, I was asked if there were any older technologies other than COBOL where we were in serious danger of running out of talent. They wanted me to talk about Fortran, but I didn’t take the bait. I don’t think there will be a critical shortage of Fortran programmers now or at any time in the future. But there’s a bigger question lurking behind Fortran and COBOL: what are the ingredients of a technology shortage? Why is running out of COBOL programmers a problem?

The answer, I think, is fairly simple. We always hear about the millions (if not billions) of lines of COBOL code running financial and government institutions, in many cases code that was written in the 1960s or 70s and hasn’t been touched since. That means that COBOL code is infrastructure we rely on, like roads and bridges. If a bridge collapses, or an interstate highway falls into disrepair, that’s a big problem. The same is true of the software running banks.

Fortran isn’t the same. Yes, the language was invented in 1957, two years earlier than COBOL. Yes, millions of lines of code have been written in it. (Probably billions, maybe even trillions.) However, Fortran and COBOL are used in fundamentally different ways. While Fortran was used to create infrastructure, software written in Fortran isn’t itself infrastructure. (There are some exceptions, but not at the scale of COBOL.) Fortran is used to solve specific problems in engineering and science. Nobody cares anymore about the Fortran code written in the 60s, 70s, and 80s to design new bridges and cars. Fortran is still heavily used in engineering—but that old code has retired. Those older tools have been reworked and replaced.  Libraries for linear algebra are still important (LAPACK), some modeling applications are still in use (NEC4, used to design antennas), and even some important libraries used primarily by other languages (the Python machine learning library scikit-learn calls both NumPy and SciPy, which in turn call LAPACK and other low level mathematical libraries written in Fortran and C). But if all the world’s Fortran programmers were to magically disappear, these libraries and applications could be rebuilt fairly quickly in modern languages—many of which already have excellent libraries for linear algebra and machine learning. The continued maintenance of Fortran libraries that are used primarily by Fortran programmers is, almost by definition, not a problem. ...  '

(Much more at the link)  ....