FORTRAN doesn’t want to die

… at least not in the climate community 😉 If you ever had to deal with the code of an atmospheric model, or maybe even an Earth System Model, you might have encountered FORTRAN or C code. While, for most of you programmers out there, FORTRAN or C are never/barely-heard or touched aliens, these low-level programming languages are essentially the foundation for the success of higher-level languages, such as Python or R. They very often do the nasty stuff behind classes and functions that are available in the form of packages. So, let me tell you a short story…

Who still does FORTRAN? Well, I sometimes do. It’s a good practice of simplicity, recalling the most fundamental building blocks of programming and aiming for efficiency.
Look at the following 23 lines of code and tell me that there doesn’t lie some beauty in it 😉
It will give you an estimate of pi with at least 2 correct digits (in most cases, I presume).


Get the full repo here!