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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

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).
federchen13 10y ago
>Fortran offers nothing that C++, C, Rust, Julia, and Python have that can't be achieved using the respective language. We are currently preparing to develop and program new classes of algorithms (statistics) for use with (upcomming) Intel MIC processors. I recently succeded with implementing a customized synchronisation procedure based on atomics using Fortran 2008 coarrays. (In my opinion, customized synchronisation procedures allow to enter a new level in parallel programming). To make efficient and safe use of atomics, it was required to make use of several Fortran specific programming techniques, and tricks, that are all together hardly available in any of the other programming languages, at least not easily. (To be honest, Intel ifort does currently not support all of them neither -possibly a bug, I did request on this recently-). Also, to achieve our goal: C++ is too much OOP (runtime polymorphism) whereas C has too less support for objects to allow for highly efficient parallel programming (that's just my personal opinion).
- gravypod 10y ago
  > to achieve our goal: C++ is too much OOP (runtime polymorphism) That's not a correct statement anymore. There are a few examples of why this statment doesn't hold true but I think the biggest thing to point you to is this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE With constexpr, const, and -O3 you're not going to beat C++ (or C) for any form of embeded-y systems development. Also.... Phis are supported by OpenCL [0] [1] [2]. This lets you use a number of languages and libraries to better handle your computational tasks [3]. Why use Fortran, C++, or C when Haskell has Accelerate or when Python has ViennaCL [4]. Benifit from the computer science world's work. Don't write your own MPI code that you'll spend 4 months debugging when higher levels of abstraction exist for the problems you want to use. My best bet for you is: either use OpenCL's compute language which is very simple and allows you to do very complex operations completely in parallel on (cheap!) commodity hardware like GPUs for 4 years ago, or learn C++ just enough because the same things are doable using C++ and OpenCL libraries. It's not too object oriented. Layers of abstraction don't slow code down if they are correctly developed. C++'s compilers and OpenCL have been correctly developed to give you frankly amazing performance for very high level features. [0] - https://software.intel.com/en-us/iocl_tec_opg https://software.intel.com/en-us/iocl_tec_opg [1] - https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/11/12/introducing-opencl-12-for-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessor https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/11/12/introducin... [2] - http://www.techenablement.com/portable-performance-opencl-intel-xeon-phi/ http://www.techenablement.com/portable-performance-opencl-in... [3] - http://www.iwocl.org/resources/opencl-libraries-and-toolkits/ http://www.iwocl.org/resources/opencl-libraries-and-toolkits... [4] - http://viennacl.sourceforge.net/ http://viennacl.sourceforge.net/

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).

federchen13 10y ago

>Fortran offers nothing that C++, C, Rust, Julia, and Python have that can't be achieved using the respective language. We are currently preparing to develop and program new classes of algorithms (statistics) for use with (upcomming) Intel MIC processors. I recently succeded with implementing a customized synchronisation procedure based on atomics using Fortran 2008 coarrays. (In my opinion, customized synchronisation procedures allow to enter a new level in parallel programming). To make efficient and safe use of atomics, it was required to make use of several Fortran specific programming techniques, and tricks, that are all together hardly available in any of the other programming languages, at least not easily. (To be honest, Intel ifort does currently not support all of them neither -possibly a bug, I did request on this recently-). Also, to achieve our goal: C++ is too much OOP (runtime polymorphism) whereas C has too less support for objects to allow for highly efficient parallel programming (that's just my personal opinion).

gravypod 10y ago
> to achieve our goal: C++ is too much OOP (runtime polymorphism) That's not a correct statement anymore. There are a few examples of why this statment doesn't hold true but I think the biggest thing to point you to is this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE With constexpr, const, and -O3 you're not going to beat C++ (or C) for any form of embeded-y systems development. Also.... Phis are supported by OpenCL [0] [1] [2]. This lets you use a number of languages and libraries to better handle your computational tasks [3]. Why use Fortran, C++, or C when Haskell has Accelerate or when Python has ViennaCL [4]. Benifit from the computer science world's work. Don't write your own MPI code that you'll spend 4 months debugging when higher levels of abstraction exist for the problems you want to use. My best bet for you is: either use OpenCL's compute language which is very simple and allows you to do very complex operations completely in parallel on (cheap!) commodity hardware like GPUs for 4 years ago, or learn C++ just enough because the same things are doable using C++ and OpenCL libraries. It's not too object oriented. Layers of abstraction don't slow code down if they are correctly developed. C++'s compilers and OpenCL have been correctly developed to give you frankly amazing performance for very high level features. [0] - https://software.intel.com/en-us/iocl_tec_opg https://software.intel.com/en-us/iocl_tec_opg [1] - https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/11/12/introducing-opencl-12-for-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessor https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/11/12/introducin... [2] - http://www.techenablement.com/portable-performance-opencl-intel-xeon-phi/ http://www.techenablement.com/portable-performance-opencl-in... [3] - http://www.iwocl.org/resources/opencl-libraries-and-toolkits/ http://www.iwocl.org/resources/opencl-libraries-and-toolkits... [4] - http://viennacl.sourceforge.net/ http://viennacl.sourceforge.net/