Hi everyone.

In the hope that this question will be accepted by this forum (since it is not very technical), I am asking for your personal opinion.

I am a junior electronics engineer and I currently program firmware using ARM (using STM32CubeIDE) and Fortran exclusively (for reasons beyond my control).
In the long term (and from a curriculum point of view) will these two "give" me enough?
Are they used as much in today's working world?
Are they a good "field" to continue investing in? Or perhaps better to migrate elsewhere?

After some research I read that Fortran has been "dead" for a while now almost everywhere ... so I kind of regret having learned it (I couldn't do otherwise).

I know this is not a technical question but an opinion/forecast on the future, I see no harm in it.

 

ARM is a generic processor that has been implemented over a very wide range of devices and manufacturers, including ST Microelectronics.

STM32CubeIDE is the software development platform used to program ST ARM MCUs. There is a wide selection of ARM MCUs from ST, from low power devices to high performance MCUs.

To develop and run programs written in Fortran, you will need a Fortran compiler that can generate ARM machine code.
Depending on the complexity of the Fortran code, I would be inclined to port the Fortran code to C. There are more tools and math libraries written in C for ARM processors.

 

Fortran was a dying language 54 years ago, when I learned it in my first programming course.

 

If you have no control and have to use Fortran on an ARM platform, then it is a moot point.

To a large degree, programming is programming. There are certainly nuances between languages, some bigger than others, but nearly any programming language provides a platform for learning and developing solid logical reasoning skills and programming practices.

I learned BASIC in high school, but was fortunate enough that my teacher focused on program design concepts more than plug and chug monkey-like syntax-oriented programming. So when I started college and the first two semesters were Fortran programming, I was able to test out of the first semester after the first two weeks of class because all I had to do was learn how to implement the basic control structures in Fortran.