Advantages and disadvantages

Many Fortran features give it both an advantage and a disadvantage. For example, it’s all of the following:

• A domain-specific language –Despite being technically a general-purpose language, Fortran is very much a domain-specific language, in the sense that it has been designed for science, engineering, and math applications. If your problem involves some arithmetic on large and structured arrays, Fortran will shine. If you want to write a web browser or low-level device drivers, Fortran is not the right tool for the task.
• A niche language –Fortran is extremely important to a relatively small number of people: scientists and engineers in select disciplines. As a consequence, it may be difficult to find as many tutorials or blogs about Fortran as there are for more mainstream languages.
• A statically and strongly typed language –As I mentioned earlier, this makes Fortran a very safe language to program in and helps compilers generate efficient executables. On the flip side, it makes it less flexible and more verbose, and thus not the ideal language for rapid prototyping.

The comparison of Fortran to Python that follows will help you better understand its advantages and disadvantages in the general-purpose programming context.