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> Without ongoing development, FORM will get less and less usable — only able to interact with older computer code, and not aligned with how today’s students le

by zokier 4y ago

> Without ongoing development, FORM will get less and less usable — only able to interact with older computer code, and not aligned with how today’s students learn to program. Experienced users will stick with it, but younger researchers will adopt alternative computer algebra programs like Mathematica that are more user-friendly but orders of magnitude slower. In practice, many of these physicists will decide that certain problems are off-limits — too difficult to handle. So particle physics will stall, with only a few people able to work on the hardest calculations. This seems very pessimistic view. FORM was written by mortal humans (with much cruder tools!) in the first place, there is no reason to believe it couldn't be done again if need be and even improved in the process; its not some irreplaceable artifact descended from heavens. On the other hand, I imagine it would take bit more than just maintenance to make the 30 year old C codebase welcoming for new physicists to work on.

xeonmc 4y ago
I wouldn't be so sure about the march of progress being monotonously towards improvement. Take Electron,
- a1369209993 4y ago
  > Take Electron, I'd rather not, thanks. Unless you meant in the sense of "take it out back and shoot it", in which case we're bloody trying already, it's not that easy.
robacarp 4y ago
I'm not at all worried that particle physics will slow down (...heh) because of this. It sounds like the one guy has been doing an incredible job of service maintenance over the years, sure, but these folks write software all the time. I have a hunch that FORM is not made up of easy to grok software designs or it would probably be true that other folks would have contributed in a bigger way regardless of academic stimuli. If that is indeed the case, as is common in research-academia software product, then tie a bow on it and send it off to the Smithsonian. I would be really quite surprised if some enterprising 19 year old whiz-bang genius from Iceland didn't re-write it in Mathematica.
- Qem 4y ago
  > I would be really quite surprised if some enterprising 19 year old whiz-bang genius from Iceland didn't re-write it in Mathematica. Still would be a net loss for science, as a critical piece of software infrastructure would become tied to Wolfram's proprietary black box. Also I think academic software benefits less often from a random precocious outsider fixing things, because in addition to good programming knowledge, it requires a fair amount of subject matter expertise, what is rare to be found both in the same person.
- robacarp 4y ago
  having now poked at the source code on github, yeah this is not at all maintainable by modern standards. it's the kind of code you're unable to modify until you memorize every last line and the whole problem domain.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    I’ve spent a ton of time working on numerical code written in various languages and this code looks absolutely maintainable. Given how widely it’s been ported on how many platforms that’s not particularly surprising. If you’re used to business software or stuff that deals in essentially parsing and concatenating strings maybe it’s unfamiliar what a numerical C program looks like and it’s daunting looking. But frankly I feel like I could probably understand most and contribute meaningfully with a few weeks of experimenting. The comments are fairly detailed, things seem to be well compartmentalized into functions, there’s not a huge over reliance on macros, non numerical variables tend to be reasonably named.
akiselev 4y ago
The hard part isn’t writing the code but making sure it’s valid against all the data in (for example) the PDG Review of Particle Physics book. A bug in the code would throw doubt on every paper published with it so the expected value for any individual rewriting it or making any modifications is extremely negative for their career.
naasking 4y ago
> FORM was written by mortal humans (with much cruder tools!) in the first place, there is no reason to believe it couldn't be done again if need be and even improved in the process Sure, but how long will that take and how robust will the result be? Given the description of the design, it basically sounds like it does efficient block-level storage management in order to handle the petabytes of data that it might need to churn through, so basically you're reimplementing a DB storage engine, which is no small feat to get right and performant. Furthermore, is there a test suite to validate that the FORM2.0 yields the same results for all past papers? These problems are not unsolvable but they're not trivial either.

by zokier 4y ago

xeonmc 4y ago

I wouldn't be so sure about the march of progress being monotonously towards improvement. Take Electron,

a1369209993 4y ago
> Take Electron, I'd rather not, thanks. Unless you meant in the sense of "take it out back and shoot it", in which case we're bloody trying already, it's not that easy.

robacarp 4y ago

I'm not at all worried that particle physics will slow down (...heh) because of this. It sounds like the one guy has been doing an incredible job of service maintenance over the years, sure, but these folks write software all the time. I have a hunch that FORM is not made up of easy to grok software designs or it would probably be true that other folks would have contributed in a bigger way regardless of academic stimuli. If that is indeed the case, as is common in research-academia software product, then tie a bow on it and send it off to the Smithsonian. I would be really quite surprised if some enterprising 19 year old whiz-bang genius from Iceland didn't re-write it in Mathematica.

Qem 4y ago
> I would be really quite surprised if some enterprising 19 year old whiz-bang genius from Iceland didn't re-write it in Mathematica. Still would be a net loss for science, as a critical piece of software infrastructure would become tied to Wolfram's proprietary black box. Also I think academic software benefits less often from a random precocious outsider fixing things, because in addition to good programming knowledge, it requires a fair amount of subject matter expertise, what is rare to be found both in the same person.
robacarp 4y ago
having now poked at the source code on github, yeah this is not at all maintainable by modern standards. it's the kind of code you're unable to modify until you memorize every last line and the whole problem domain.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  I’ve spent a ton of time working on numerical code written in various languages and this code looks absolutely maintainable. Given how widely it’s been ported on how many platforms that’s not particularly surprising. If you’re used to business software or stuff that deals in essentially parsing and concatenating strings maybe it’s unfamiliar what a numerical C program looks like and it’s daunting looking. But frankly I feel like I could probably understand most and contribute meaningfully with a few weeks of experimenting. The comments are fairly detailed, things seem to be well compartmentalized into functions, there’s not a huge over reliance on macros, non numerical variables tend to be reasonably named.

akiselev 4y ago

The hard part isn’t writing the code but making sure it’s valid against all the data in (for example) the PDG Review of Particle Physics book. A bug in the code would throw doubt on every paper published with it so the expected value for any individual rewriting it or making any modifications is extremely negative for their career.

naasking 4y ago

> FORM was written by mortal humans (with much cruder tools!) in the first place, there is no reason to believe it couldn't be done again if need be and even improved in the process Sure, but how long will that take and how robust will the result be? Given the description of the design, it basically sounds like it does efficient block-level storage management in order to handle the petabytes of data that it might need to churn through, so basically you're reimplementing a DB storage engine, which is no small feat to get right and performant. Furthermore, is there a test suite to validate that the FORM2.0 yields the same results for all past papers? These problems are not unsolvable but they're not trivial either.