[Beowulf] Fortran is Awesome

[Prentice Bisbal]

One misunderstanding people have about Fortran is that they always want 
to compare it to C. C is more of a 'general purpose' language that was  
originally designed for low-level programming tasks, like programming 
operating systems without using assembly. On the other hand, Fortran is 
a domain-specific language meant for one specific purpose: numerical 
programming.

Comparing these two languages to each other is like comparing an SUV to 
a Ferrari. The have completely different design goals, so have 
completely different strengths and weaknesses.  Once you explain that to 
someone who says "OMG! You know people who still use Fortran", they 
usually get it.

Prentice

On 11/28/18 11:50 AM, Paul Edmon wrote:
>
> It's still the case the for intense numerical analysis Fortran is best 
> even though the gap between it and C has diminished. Being a 
> computational astrophysicist by training I can speak from experience 
> that Fortran is superior to C for doing serious numerical work at 
> scale.  What Fortran does well it does very well, and it still does 
> very well.
>
> Once C has native arrays and orders them properly, then we can talk :).
>
> -Paul Edmon-
>
> On 11/28/18 11:36 AM, Peter St. John wrote:
>> Maybe I'm being too serious but in the old days, Fortran was the most 
>> mature, maintained compiler and the libraries were great, then later, 
>> C had better compilers but the libraries were still great. Now, I 
>> think the only good thing about Fortran is that it's pretty easy to 
>> learn?
>>
>> Peter
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 11:30 AM Stu Midgley <sdm900 at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:sdm900 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     I agree 100% .  You can't beat bash and fortran.
>>
>>     On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 9:02 AM Paul Edmon
>>     <pedmon at cfa.harvard.edu <mailto:pedmon at cfa.harvard.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>         Fortran is and remains an awesome language.  More people
>>         should use it:
>>
>>         https://wordsandbuttons.online/fortran_is_still_a_thing.html
>>
>>         -Paul Edmon-
>>
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>>
>>
>>     -- 
>>     Dr Stuart Midgley
>>     sdm900 at gmail.com <mailto:sdm900 at gmail.com>
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>
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