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posted by LaminatorX on Friday May 09 2014, @09:18AM   Printer-friendly
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.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by gidds on Friday May 09 2014, @01:20PM

    by gidds (589) on Friday May 09 2014, @01:20PM (#41232)

    I know people who would love to use a more modern language, but are running formidably-sized numerical programs on big iron.

    They say that after all its years of being heavily optimised, FORTRAN is simply faster for that than anything else going.

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