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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

• 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
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