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> I'm not. I'm assuming these decisions are made because people in physics/ME/chemistry are not programmers and don't know about the latest and greatest our fie

by sidlls 10y ago

> I'm not. I'm assuming these decisions are made because people in physics/ME/chemistry are not programmers and don't know about the latest and greatest our field has to offer. It's our fault for not advertising our successes to these people. I can understand having some of the other opinions you expressed, but this just seems egregious in the casual assumption that "the latest and greatest" is somehow universally applicable, or specifically applicable to scientific contexts. Sometimes in some cases new isn't better.

gravypod 10y ago
I fully agree and if you look at my other comments in this thread you will see the things that I think are done better and the advantages that I feel modern languages have. In this case age has something to do with it. There are far fewer people who know fortran, there are far fewer people working on good fortran libraries, and there are languages that can do the same thing that fortran can do. My issue is that fortran can do the same things (we can argue about speed because that's not really the language's fault) but it has a detraction that other languages don't have. No one outside of very limited subsets of the software development community uses it. I see that as a huge detraction. Maybe others don't, but I do.
- tanderson92 10y ago
  The limited subset of the software dev community is the precise subset you are saying shouldn't use it... People in my field don't use PHP, either. Doesn't make it a bad language for its purposes, but certainly limited subset. All the 20-somethings (including myself) in my research group use Fortran.
- sidlls 10y ago
  > No one outside of very limited subsets of the software development community uses it. Well, sure, but there's nothing wrong with that, it doesn't mean the language is bad, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's wrong to use it.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    I'm not saying the language is bad. I'm saying that is a detraction to using the language. Python has taken off in the scientific community because of the huge amount of code written by non-scientific programmers. Fortran will never benefit from this level of community support. Scientists aren't interested in abstracting problems, improving libraries, or software organization but those things are important for having a productive, easy to use, and fast language. Scientists are missing out on the benefits of community support for, in my opinion, no articulable or valid reason. Some in this thread have said "It's because of number libraries" and others have said that "It's because of speed". I think I have shown, and that cursory research will show, that neither are the case. Fortran offers nothing that C++, C, Rust, Julia, and Python have that can't be achieved using the respective language. What it does have is a small following who your work can only be appreciated by. To me writing a program in Fortran is like an English major setting out to write a modern day English dictionary but choosing to write it in 17th century Celtic English. You can definitely do it, it might be easier for an expert to do it this way, but it will never leave it's audience. Anyone who wants to use your work will need to rewrite it or painfully wrap it. You'll also have perpetual trouble finding people who can work on your project in the future.
    - qb45 10y ago
      C/C++: no convenient array support and ugly, noob-unfriendly syntax. People hate C/C++ type declaration. And don't even mention raw pointers, I have seen first hand how a bunch of clever C programmers can screw up trying to do arrays with these. Rust: does it even have arbitrarily-indexed multidimensional arrays, again? Are there good compilers? What's the performance on loop-heavy and cache-heavy code? (C at least has this covered). What are the floating point semantics and how do they affect accuracy and optimization opportunities? Julia: now that's just a Fortran of the 21st century. In few decades bikeshedders will bitch how it doesn't support the latest C++42 features, completely disregarding that understanding C++, especially code written by others, requires pretty much devoting one's life to understanding C++. Not to mention that Julia looks visually different from JavaScript and doesn't even run in the browser. What's this early 21st century Celtic relict even doing here? Don't they get that developers want to use the Web nowadays? Python: by your own standards it's worse than C because it lacks explicit inlining. QED. Never mind that C doesn't have explicit inlining either :p (hint: read docs).
- lacampbell 10y ago
  I'd bet there's more people who know Fortran today than there are who knew Fortran in the 1970s. While scientific programming is no longer dominant in computing, remember that computing itself has grown and expanded into an enormous number of other fields.

by sidlls 10y ago

gravypod 10y ago

I fully agree and if you look at my other comments in this thread you will see the things that I think are done better and the advantages that I feel modern languages have. In this case age has something to do with it. There are far fewer people who know fortran, there are far fewer people working on good fortran libraries, and there are languages that can do the same thing that fortran can do. My issue is that fortran can do the same things (we can argue about speed because that's not really the language's fault) but it has a detraction that other languages don't have. No one outside of very limited subsets of the software development community uses it. I see that as a huge detraction. Maybe others don't, but I do.

tanderson92 10y ago
The limited subset of the software dev community is the precise subset you are saying shouldn't use it... People in my field don't use PHP, either. Doesn't make it a bad language for its purposes, but certainly limited subset. All the 20-somethings (including myself) in my research group use Fortran.
sidlls 10y ago
> No one outside of very limited subsets of the software development community uses it. Well, sure, but there's nothing wrong with that, it doesn't mean the language is bad, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's wrong to use it.
- gravypod 10y ago
  I'm not saying the language is bad. I'm saying that is a detraction to using the language. Python has taken off in the scientific community because of the huge amount of code written by non-scientific programmers. Fortran will never benefit from this level of community support. Scientists aren't interested in abstracting problems, improving libraries, or software organization but those things are important for having a productive, easy to use, and fast language. Scientists are missing out on the benefits of community support for, in my opinion, no articulable or valid reason. Some in this thread have said "It's because of number libraries" and others have said that "It's because of speed". I think I have shown, and that cursory research will show, that neither are the case. Fortran offers nothing that C++, C, Rust, Julia, and Python have that can't be achieved using the respective language. What it does have is a small following who your work can only be appreciated by. To me writing a program in Fortran is like an English major setting out to write a modern day English dictionary but choosing to write it in 17th century Celtic English. You can definitely do it, it might be easier for an expert to do it this way, but it will never leave it's audience. Anyone who wants to use your work will need to rewrite it or painfully wrap it. You'll also have perpetual trouble finding people who can work on your project in the future.
  - qb45 10y ago
    C/C++: no convenient array support and ugly, noob-unfriendly syntax. People hate C/C++ type declaration. And don't even mention raw pointers, I have seen first hand how a bunch of clever C programmers can screw up trying to do arrays with these. Rust: does it even have arbitrarily-indexed multidimensional arrays, again? Are there good compilers? What's the performance on loop-heavy and cache-heavy code? (C at least has this covered). What are the floating point semantics and how do they affect accuracy and optimization opportunities? Julia: now that's just a Fortran of the 21st century. In few decades bikeshedders will bitch how it doesn't support the latest C++42 features, completely disregarding that understanding C++, especially code written by others, requires pretty much devoting one's life to understanding C++. Not to mention that Julia looks visually different from JavaScript and doesn't even run in the browser. What's this early 21st century Celtic relict even doing here? Don't they get that developers want to use the Web nowadays? Python: by your own standards it's worse than C because it lacks explicit inlining. QED. Never mind that C doesn't have explicit inlining either :p (hint: read docs).
lacampbell 10y ago
I'd bet there's more people who know Fortran today than there are who knew Fortran in the 1970s. While scientific programming is no longer dominant in computing, remember that computing itself has grown and expanded into an enormous number of other fields.