[Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place

[Renfro, Michael]

Minor point of pedagogy from my place in the "learned FORTRAN 77 in 1990" crowd: your instructor's options would have been:


  *   standard FORTRAN 77
  *   vendor-specific dialect of FORTRAN (VAX or otherwise)
  *   maybe a pre-release of FORTRAN 90? Wasn't released and standardized until 1991-92.

Never mind the availability of texts for same.

From: Beowulf <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org>
Date: Monday, October 19, 2020 at 12:06 PM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place

On 10/19/20 10:28 AM, Douglas Eadline wrote:
> --snip--
>
>> Unfortunately the presumption seems to be that the old is deficient
>> because it is old, and "my generation” didn't invent it (which is
>> clearly perverse; I see no rush to replace English, French, … which are
>> all older than any of our programming languages, and which adapt, as do
>> our programming languages).
>>
> I think this has a lot to do with the Fortran situation. In these "modern"
> times, software seems to have gone from "releases" to a "sliding
> constant release" cycle and anything not released in the past few
> months is "old."
>
> How many people here will wait a 2-6 months before installing
> a "new version" of some package in production to make sure there
> are no major issues. And of course keep older version options
> with software modules. Perhaps because I've been at this a while,
> I have a let it "mellow a bit" approach to shinny new software.
>
> I find it odd that Fortran gets placed in the "old software box"
> because it works while new languages with their constant feature
> churn and versions break dependency trees all over the place,
> and somehow that is good thing. Now get off my lawn.
>
> --
> Doug
>
Now we're starting to veer of course a little here, but what the hell...

I think that one of the problems with Fortran is a complete
misunderstanding of it's purpose. People are always shocked when I tell
them the scientists I support are "still" using Fortran. Many people
think that C and C++ replaced Fortran, but that is not true. C was
designed to do low-level programming for tasks like writing operating
systems, and C++ is just an extension of the C language to support
Object-Oriented Programming. Both C and C++ are lower-level and more
general purpose than Fortran.

Fortran is a domain-specific language, meaning it was meant for a
special purpose, which in this case is doing mathematical operations,
and it's very good for those sorts of things. It's trivial to create
multidimensional arrays in Fortran, which is useful for many math
operations, but C doesn't even support anything beyond 1D  arrays. Sure
you can mimic multidimensional arrays by keeping track of stride length,
etc., but that's a lot of work, and I'm betting that's work a lot of
scientists would rather not do. That's just one example of Fortran being
friendlier for science. I'm sure there are other examples, but I'm not a
programmer, and definitely NOT a Fortran programmer.

I think the main reason most people look at Fortran as an old and
outdated language is because it stuck to the "punch card" formatting
long after punch cards and punch card readers disappeared, but I'm not
sure who to blame for that. Do I blame my freshman "Programming for
Engineers" instructor who taught me Fortran 77 in 1991, or do I blame
whoever maintains the Fortran standard for not updating it before then?
(I honestly don't know what the latest version of Fortran was in the
fall of 1991).

Prentice

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