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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: 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_