Fortran Forever

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story imageArsTechnica has an interesting article featured today about scientific computing and the enduring role played by the Fortran programming language . The article explores three potential challengers to the dominance of Fortran in scientific computing including Haskell , Clojure , and Julia . One of the main points made by the article is that support for existing Fortran and C libraries is essential as is support for concurrent (parallel) algorithms. Will Fortran rule scientific computing forever or will a challenger usurp the throne?

[edited 2014-05-09 13:32 for spelling]
Reply 7 comments

Fortran lives! (Score: 3, Interesting)

by skarjak@pipedot.org on 2014-05-08 16:01 (#1G2)

I did my undergraduate work entirely in Fortran. Just for reference, I am in my mid-twenties... My supervisor told me that's the language I should use. There are certain fields where a lot of really useful code is in Fortran, so it's at the very least important to be able to read it (although that's clearly not very hard to do). Some people had some convincing numbers to show Fortran programs were more efficient than C programs for number crunching. Given that a lot of our code is just running a set of very simple operations a huge amout of times, Fortran does a great job. The only issue I had with it is the lack of widely available libraries compared to more modern languages. You've got Numerical recipes and a few other non-free libraries, and then the rest are homemade solutions stored somewhere on your supervisor's hard drive...

I switched to C for my graduate work and I was pretty happy with it. I'll gladly save myself some coding time, even if it means my programs might run a little slower. They can run 24/7, I can't program in these conditions. :p

Re: Fortran lives! (Score: 3, Informative)

by skarjak@pipedot.org on 2014-05-08 16:02 (#1G3)

I should add that when people think of Fortran, they think of Fortran 77, which is truly a primitive language (one I unfortunately had to deal with...). The recent Fortran standards are a lot more sane and bring it a lot closer to something like python.

Re: Fortran lives! (Score: 2, Funny)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-08 16:43 (#1G4)

Fortran 77 is certainly what I think of. I only ever learned two programming languages (Commodore 64 BASIC doesn't count): Pascal and Fortran 77. And at the time I thought Fortran was pretty damned cool. Those two were enough to show me I didn't have the right disposition (or intellect) to be a programmer, and I took another career path. But I do have a bit of nostalgia for that old language. I even remember writing my programs out on graph paper to make sure I had things in the right columns. What was that old deal where any characters beyond column 77 wouldn't be regarded as anything but a comment, or something like that? Fun times in 1991.

What about R? Go? Python? (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-08 16:44 (#1G5)

I think the scientists all like Python quite a bit. But Go comes to mind too - isn't that supposed be a language well suited for scientific number crunching and the like?

thrown? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-09 00:34 (#1G8)

Where were they thrown to? Oh, you meant THRONE!

Re: thrown? (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-09 18:31 (#1GG)

Ah, good catch. Corrected. Carry on with your otherwise happy existences :)

parallel disscussion (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-10 20:22 (#1GV)

The /. discussion of this Ars article is actually pretty good. Old school good in fact.