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from the Get-Off-My-Extremely-Efficient-Lawn dept.
Ars technica looks at Fortran, and some new number crunching languages in Scientific computing's future: Can any coding language top a 1950s behemoth?
This state of affairs seems paradoxical. Why, in a temple of modernity employing research instruments at the bleeding edge of technology, does a language from the very earliest days of the electronic computer continue to dominate? When Fortran was created, our ancestors were required to enter their programs by punching holes in cardboard rectangles: one statement per card, with a tall stack of these constituting the code. There was no vim or emacs. If you made a typo, you had to punch a new card and give the stack to the computer operator again. Your output came to you on a heavy pile of paper. The computers themselves, about as powerful as today's smartphones, were giant installations that required entire buildings.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 09 2014, @10:22AM
It may not be common knowledge that Fortran has undergone quite substantial evolution (it did stagnate between 1977 and 1990, that probably caused much of its image as an outdated language). Modern Fortran differs more from 1950's FORTRAN than C++11 does from K&R C.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pasky on Friday May 09 2014, @10:59AM
That's *nice*, but having "1990" in the name of the language doesn't mean it's actually well supported. If you look at e.g. https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/2829 [github.com] you see that scipy has trouble migrating from 37 year old Fortran language standard to 24 year old Fortran language standard because upgrade from 8 years old gcc version to a newer one would interfere with library linking on 12 years old Windows version.
It's a special kind of hell.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by choose another one on Friday May 09 2014, @12:32PM
Your problem is not with FORTRAN versions but with trying to use Python, and probably nasty GUI stuff. If you stick to being a "real programmer" and write everything in FORTRAN you wouldn't have that problem (but then you'd use '66 to ensure that you "compile DO loops like God meant them to be").
If you really have to do that "visualization" stuff, put your output numbers in a text file and visualize in your head (what it's for). If there are too many numbers for the screen, then print them out, pin the top of the printout to the top of the wall and drape downwards and across the floor from there, repeat with extra printouts to the right if > 132 columns required. You do have a 132 col line printer & fan fold paper, right (I mean how do you visualise your data otherwise) ?
If you really have to, calculate your pixels for your visualization / GUI (shudder), in FORTRAN and drop to assembler to blit them to screen. Or use a FORTRAN visualization library that creates Gif or Pdf - but we're heading away from the one true path and towards heresy there...
[ mostly, but not all, with tongue in cheek and obviously ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don' t_Use_Pascal [wikipedia.org] ]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 09 2014, @12:32PM
High performance calculations don't run on Windows anyway. Do you know a single Windows supercomputer?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 09 2014, @08:13PM
Do you know a single Windows supercomputer?
You can see that if you squint really hard. [wikimedia.org]
Among the fastest 500 recorded, the number fluctuates between two [tomsitpro.com] and three. [google.com]
I wish I had bookmarked the page:
A new system had been built and they were benchmarking it.
For about an hour the world's fastest system ran Windoze.
After they installed Linux on that system, they had a new mark for world's fastest.
-- gewg_