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Fortran Still Top Langauage For Number Crunching

posted by LaminatorX on Friday May 09 2014, @09:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the Get-Off-My-Extremely-Efficient-Lawn dept.

Blackmoore writes:

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 09 2014, @10:32AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 09 2014, @10:32AM (#41187) Journal
    Here you have an example [wikipedia.org] for the state of the art computing device 1965:

    The system came with four memory sizes: E (32 KiB), F (64 KiB), G (128 KiB), and H (256 KiB), with an access time of 1 us, which put it closer to the Model 65 (.75 us) than the Model 50 (2.0 us).[3]:pp.6-11,6-12[1] Storage protection was an optional feature

    So, 256 kB of memory, with 1MHz clock (no need to go faster, you wouldn't be able to read the memory anyway), looked approximately like this [wikipedia.org].
    And this is [wikipedia.org] how the "flash memory stick" of that time looked like - it was indeed "portable"... provided you were wearing a van as a coat.

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  • (Score: 2) by egcagrac0 on Friday May 09 2014, @01:28PM

    by egcagrac0 (2705) on Friday May 09 2014, @01:28PM (#41234)

    Ahh, the good old days, when "hard disk" was not the same as "hard drive"...