I disagree. As a fairly recent grad (Aerospace/Mechanical Engineering, USC '06) who was taught Fortran in his first formal programming class, I would say HELL NO. If you're going to teach interpreted languages, then you should be focusing on Python and MATLAB, both widely used in a number of industries. If you're going to teach students a compiled language, then why in the world aren't you teaching C/C++, which has an infinitely greater reach? I haven't even so much as looked at Fortran since leaving school, but I've become quite good at C. Even if I did have to go back and work with Fortran, I'm confident that a couple of weeks of review would be sufficient to get me going, now that my fundamentals are strong. Really, the only exception I can see is if you're going to be running a simulation on a supercomputer, and how many of us do that on a day-to-day basis?

Twenty minutes, I thought, was obviously hyperbole. Maybe I should have said an hour. The Casio interface was horribly slow and clunky when I used it on one of their color graphing calcs. I remember having to wait for a dialog to come up (*twiddle thumbs*) and enter the information there (there was no way to direct-graph from the home screen as there is on the 89), and then it was extremely slow (took 5-10 seconds to plot the graph). Essentially the same problems I have/had with the 48GX, but the HP was much more capable. Of course, things could have changed. So if such is the case and the Casios are no longer horrid (the one I had was just that, horrid), then I stand corrected.