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Saying fortran is not legible is not an argument that holds water against fortran 90. I don't want to be uncharitable but I don't know how anyone can have this

Saying fortran is not legible is not an argument that holds water against fortran 90. I don't want to be uncharitable but I don't know how anyone can have this opinion unless they just don't have much familiarity with it.

jcranmer 1y ago
A large share of the illegibility of Fortran code is actually just the aversion of numerics code to having meaningful variable names.
- atrettel 1y ago
  I second this. When I worked on some older Fortran codes, I had to keep a cheat sheet for the variable names and what they meant or controlled. It definitely made the code hard to read.
  - noobermin 1y ago
    Yeah, this isn't the case for any codes written since may be the 00s or even the late 90s, although I admit I haven't worked on a code that old recently.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Something that also happens in languages like C and Go, while C has the same reason as Fortran, given the limitations of their early compilers, Go has no reason for single letter receivers.
patagurbon 1y ago
I didn’t say it was illegible. I said legibility is paramount, and I don’t think it makes the right trade offs in that regard to be a great teaching language It’s far more legible for numerics than a lot of languages, maybe except Julia and Chapel. Julia was just driven in large part by teaching mathematics at mit and I think that shows
- mastermage 1y ago
  I would go and say Fortran is pretty legible because it only has a handful of builtin keywords and none of the fancy stuff alot of other languages have. Julia has the fancy stuff aswell as being very legible and also having a nice REPL for instant feedback which is usefull for people learning (as well as multiple notebook implementations Pluto.jl or Jupyter) Chapel has even more of the fancy stuff like multiple loop types for different kinds of parallelism which is just wildly cool.
kjs3 1y ago
Regrettably, any discussion of Fortran will be quickly filled with people who once had to write a couple of F77 programs in college and never got over it, never used a really nice Fortran compiler, and of the very few who actually knew the language has evolved in the last 50 years the vast majority of that minority couldn't name a single significant thing that changed in F90/F95 through Fortran 2018. But they all have Opinions, which they are compelled to share.
- adastra22 1y ago
  C++ has evolved immensely in that same time. I still would NEVER use C++ for anything new, now that Rust exists. Why should I use Fortran, for anything that isn't maintaining legacy code?
  - atemerev 1y ago
    I like modern C++ much better than Rust. I am 3 times more productive in it and don't have to fight the compiler for hours. And RAII is a simple idiom that prevents 95% of actual problems.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      Your C++ is full of bugs that rustc was telling you about.
      - atemerev 1y ago
        Well yes, the code I didn't wrote (because I was 3x slower) surely has no bugs.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Including on LLVM backend used by Rust, I guess. When is that fully bootstraped rustc coming?
  - noobermin 1y ago
    Fortran is nowadays a DSL for computational codes. If you don't know why you would or could use it, you're not the target audience for it. Calling it a DSL is a bit rich given the history of computing but at least that way at least CS and developer types will know how to regard it.
pjmlp 1y ago
Or Fortran 2023, the current standard.

jcranmer 1y ago

A large share of the illegibility of Fortran code is actually just the aversion of numerics code to having meaningful variable names.

atrettel 1y ago
I second this. When I worked on some older Fortran codes, I had to keep a cheat sheet for the variable names and what they meant or controlled. It definitely made the code hard to read.
- noobermin 1y ago
  Yeah, this isn't the case for any codes written since may be the 00s or even the late 90s, although I admit I haven't worked on a code that old recently.
pjmlp 1y ago
Something that also happens in languages like C and Go, while C has the same reason as Fortran, given the limitations of their early compilers, Go has no reason for single letter receivers.

patagurbon 1y ago

I didn’t say it was illegible. I said legibility is paramount, and I don’t think it makes the right trade offs in that regard to be a great teaching language It’s far more legible for numerics than a lot of languages, maybe except Julia and Chapel. Julia was just driven in large part by teaching mathematics at mit and I think that shows

mastermage 1y ago
I would go and say Fortran is pretty legible because it only has a handful of builtin keywords and none of the fancy stuff alot of other languages have. Julia has the fancy stuff aswell as being very legible and also having a nice REPL for instant feedback which is usefull for people learning (as well as multiple notebook implementations Pluto.jl or Jupyter) Chapel has even more of the fancy stuff like multiple loop types for different kinds of parallelism which is just wildly cool.

kjs3 1y ago

Regrettably, any discussion of Fortran will be quickly filled with people who once had to write a couple of F77 programs in college and never got over it, never used a really nice Fortran compiler, and of the very few who actually knew the language has evolved in the last 50 years the vast majority of that minority couldn't name a single significant thing that changed in F90/F95 through Fortran 2018. But they all have Opinions, which they are compelled to share.

adastra22 1y ago
C++ has evolved immensely in that same time. I still would NEVER use C++ for anything new, now that Rust exists. Why should I use Fortran, for anything that isn't maintaining legacy code?
- atemerev 1y ago
  I like modern C++ much better than Rust. I am 3 times more productive in it and don't have to fight the compiler for hours. And RAII is a simple idiom that prevents 95% of actual problems.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    Your C++ is full of bugs that rustc was telling you about.
    - atemerev 1y ago
      Well yes, the code I didn't wrote (because I was 3x slower) surely has no bugs.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Including on LLVM backend used by Rust, I guess. When is that fully bootstraped rustc coming?
- noobermin 1y ago
  Fortran is nowadays a DSL for computational codes. If you don't know why you would or could use it, you're not the target audience for it. Calling it a DSL is a bit rich given the history of computing but at least that way at least CS and developer types will know how to regard it.

pjmlp 1y ago

Or Fortran 2023, the current standard.