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I'm interested in the historical and current use of FORTRAN. However, the article wanders off topic and (in my opinion) loses credibility when it dives into opi
by dj-wonk 11y ago
I'm interested in the historical and current use of FORTRAN. However, the article wanders off topic and (in my opinion) loses credibility when it dives into opinion.
For example, "Fortran is the language of high-performance technical computing -- even if this is an increasingly smaller segment of today's computing activities."
I grow weary of this form of sentence construction. Saying "X is the language of Y" smacks of marketing, not something that I want to see in a journal such as the International Journal of High-Energy Physics. I don't mind if a writer claims something the best language for high-performance technical computing, but they should at least give some comparison with alternatives and empirical support.
Update: I see this was written in 2007.
- dekhn 11y ago"Fortran is the language of high-performance technical computing -- even if this is an increasingly smaller segment of today's computing activities" is a fact, not an opinion. You can (and I'm sure CERN does) count up the lines of code in each language, map them to instructions, count the number of instructions (mapped back to the language) executed, and see that Fortran dominates. And you can also see that HPC is a much smaller slice of the market share. The author wasn't making an opinion claim- just facts. In particular, when an english speaker says "X is the Y of Z" they aren't saying it's better, they're saying its more prevalent.
- dj-wonk 11y agoOk, I see that doing so is a standard usage: > (pronounced stressing “the”) used to indicate that someone or something is the best known or most important of that name or type. "he was the hot young piano prospect in jazz" I would tend to agree that "best known" is relatively objective (in theory -- but who really believes in an objective definition of what 'everyone' knows?); however, "most important" clearly tends towards subjectivity, as it implies value judgments into what is important and why.
- tanderson92 11y agoThe thing is, this is not marketing. Performance really does matter in HPC and in quite a few areas the workflow is to prototype in Matlab and write implementations in modern Fortran. You can write performant code in C/C++, and many do, but Fortran is still the easiest to do so in.
- CyberDildonics 11y ago> Fortran is still the easiest to do so in. Let's not get too carried away, what is an example of Fortran making speed easier than C++?
- RogerL 11y agoAliasing, for one. Plus, array's are a first class feature in Fortran. "But Eigen!" you retort. Sure, except this library I want to use uses MTL4, this other library that I need uses uBlas, and this other one uses MKL. Ouch, ouch, ouch. Pretty much if you can write Matlab you can write very highly performant Fortran without doing anything too special. Dealing with incompatible libraries, templates, and all the other stuff that C++ subjects you to is not 'easy'.
- CyberDildonics 11y agoWhat I've learned is that when people say Fortan is faster, they mean for their specific math based usages due to good integrated libraries, and that they often doesn't really know C++.
- greglindahl 11y agoMost Fortran compilers are also C/C++ compilers. One way to spot the best compiler engineers is that they are the ones who appreciate how Fortran makes optimization easier. Argument aliasing rules, discouraging pointer use, lack of 15 layers of templates, 1st class arrays, and so forth. These same compiler engineers don't want to actually write any Fortran -- but I assure you, as an astronomer, I really prefer it that my Astronomy colleagues write Fortran instead of C/C++. It ends up being better code.
- rootbear 11y agoI know that the climate models that run on the supercomputer at NASA Goddard are in Fortran. Specifically, Fortran 90/95.