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I highly doubt it. There are a lot of scientists still clinging dearly to FORTRAN90. Many scientists think in terms of the next grant/paper, not the long-term g

I highly doubt it. There are a lot of scientists still clinging dearly to FORTRAN90. Many scientists think in terms of the next grant/paper, not the long-term goal. This results in short-sighted software decisions, which are exacerbated by the fact that most scientists are (very poorly) self-taught coders.

CrLf 14y ago
Totally unlike the corporate world. (That's sarcasm, BTW.)
theorique 14y ago
Agreed. You get the behavior you incentivize. Since scientists are considered "good" or "bad" by their paper writing and fund raising productivity, and not the ease-of-use or quality of their data-analysis scripts ... well, you can guess what happens.
fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
1. These folks live or die by the status of the next grant. Most of them are not motivated by money, but rather by keeping a lab open, with a steady stream of students flowing through it. Let's not forget that there is more than one goal in science (solve problems, feed family, train more scientists/engineers/technicians/etc). 2. Their job is to solve scientific problems, not solve them in ways that make computing folk feel good. 3. Arguably the scientist who wastes time fretting about the technical details of software rather than their research or their grant, is the short sighted one.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  > 2. Their job is to solve scientific problems, not solve them in ways that make computing folk feel good. Actually, it should be. Whole fields can and do suffer because of generally crappy software practices. (Medicine) It should be thought of as not pissing off your suppliers.
tensor 14y ago
The number of short sighted software decisions made by scientists seems to be eclipsed by the number of ignorant comments made by lay people. Fortran continues to be faster than C on certain types of problems and libraries like lapack continue to use it for that reason. Changing languages just to be "hip" seems to me to be an awful thing to do.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > The number of short sighted software decisions made by scientists seems to be eclipsed by the number of ignorant comments made by lay people. Indeed, seeing as you've just contributed an ignorant comment here yourself. After all, you couldn't possibly be referring to me, since I'm not a lay person, and actually have extensive professional experience in the scientific software community. > Fortran continues to be faster than C on certain types of problems and libraries like lapack continue to use it for that reason. Changing languages just to be "hip" seems to me to be an awful thing to do. You might be surprised to learn that it's possible to use FORTRAN in conjunction with C and Python, which removes the need to write all code in it. There are usually only a select few methods that need to be optimized. Those can be written in FORTRAN, and are actually often available in library form. But none of this means you have to write entire software packages, including the high-level logic, in FORTRAN. That's something that I see shockingly often in the scientific software community.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
sampo 14y ago
In my opinion, Fortran is pretty good in the metrics of (1) easy, (2) safe, and (3) faster or as fast as C. Pretty much the perfect tool for those (poorly) self-taught coders to be productive and produce performant numerical code, without spending much time on learning the language.

CrLf 14y ago

Totally unlike the corporate world. (That's sarcasm, BTW.)

theorique 14y ago

Agreed. You get the behavior you incentivize. Since scientists are considered "good" or "bad" by their paper writing and fund raising productivity, and not the ease-of-use or quality of their data-analysis scripts ... well, you can guess what happens.

fnordfnordfnord 14y ago

1. These folks live or die by the status of the next grant. Most of them are not motivated by money, but rather by keeping a lab open, with a steady stream of students flowing through it. Let's not forget that there is more than one goal in science (solve problems, feed family, train more scientists/engineers/technicians/etc). 2. Their job is to solve scientific problems, not solve them in ways that make computing folk feel good. 3. Arguably the scientist who wastes time fretting about the technical details of software rather than their research or their grant, is the short sighted one.

stcredzero 14y ago
> 2. Their job is to solve scientific problems, not solve them in ways that make computing folk feel good. Actually, it should be. Whole fields can and do suffer because of generally crappy software practices. (Medicine) It should be thought of as not pissing off your suppliers.

tensor 14y ago

The number of short sighted software decisions made by scientists seems to be eclipsed by the number of ignorant comments made by lay people. Fortran continues to be faster than C on certain types of problems and libraries like lapack continue to use it for that reason. Changing languages just to be "hip" seems to me to be an awful thing to do.

w1ntermute 14y ago
> The number of short sighted software decisions made by scientists seems to be eclipsed by the number of ignorant comments made by lay people. Indeed, seeing as you've just contributed an ignorant comment here yourself. After all, you couldn't possibly be referring to me, since I'm not a lay person, and actually have extensive professional experience in the scientific software community. > Fortran continues to be faster than C on certain types of problems and libraries like lapack continue to use it for that reason. Changing languages just to be "hip" seems to me to be an awful thing to do. You might be surprised to learn that it's possible to use FORTRAN in conjunction with C and Python, which removes the need to write all code in it. There are usually only a select few methods that need to be optimized. Those can be written in FORTRAN, and are actually often available in library form. But none of this means you have to write entire software packages, including the high-level logic, in FORTRAN. That's something that I see shockingly often in the scientific software community.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

sampo 14y ago

In my opinion, Fortran is pretty good in the metrics of (1) easy, (2) safe, and (3) faster or as fast as C. Pretty much the perfect tool for those (poorly) self-taught coders to be productive and produce performant numerical code, without spending much time on learning the language.