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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 mai

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.

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.