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by whartung7 hours ago |
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upvoteby rbanffy3 hours ago|
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> I remember when they put in their first lab of PCs, and how they started teaching folks Turbo Pascal on micro computers, and I just felt that the users were missing out on a bigger world.

I believe Alan Kay used to say the right perspective is worth 80 IQ points. We should always strive to broaden our experiences and horizons. We get a ton of wrong perspectives, but one perspective you acquired will be a perfect fit for that thing nobody else has the right experiences to figure out immediately.

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upvoteby eichin3 hours ago|
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Heh, I used that TRS-80 (microsoft!) Fortran in high school - wrote a library for propagating error bounds and significant figures through calculations, for chemistry lab reports. (Could probably have done it in BASIC too, but I suspect I was looking for an excuse to use fortran for something :-)
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upvoteby otterdude7 hours ago|
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Fortran while historically important doesn't really seem like a good choice today.

I worked with a proprietary jet engine analysis software suite written in Fortran 77 and It felt very primitive, albeit fast.

Today I feel like C is a much better choice for speed and readability.

If you really need the fastest performance I dont think Fortran gives that much of an advantage writing assembly.

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upvoteby jleyank7 hours ago|
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With vector machines, Fortran yielded (much) faster code because (a) there was a whole lot of work on preprocessors for "dusty deck" code and (b) the lack of pointers and their overlap let the compilers do their stuff. C code needed a lot of #pragma's to let it know that some pointers didn't overlap and so could be optimized.

We found it best to to the front-end and I/O of the code in C and the compute in Fortran. Fastest calculations especially with those tailored libraries.

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upvoteby crassglassass7 hours ago|
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Aren't most people doing this kind of work these days engineers using matlab?
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upvoteby mohamedkoubaa6 hours ago|
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Fortran invented array-based programming, which arguably numpy advanced and now Julia finally perfected
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upvoteby Athas5 hours ago|
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Fortran had arrays since the beginning, but it wasn't really for "array-based programming" except in a trivial sense, since expressions could not produce arrays. APL is the language that invented first-class arrays, and is far more advanced at it than most of its successors, particularly including NumPy.

Modern Fortran has pretty serviceable support for array programming.

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upvoteby mrbonner4 hours ago|
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