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Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

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Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#211

Post by woodruffw »

School-Cotton wrote: post #186
winrid wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ignorant. Who speaks Latin today under a different name?

Speakers of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and various other lesser-known languages and dialects. All of these are directly descended from Latin in exactly the same way that today's English is descended from 1900s English, just over a longer period.

I studied (classical, not ecclesiastical) Latin for about 8 years, and I don't think it's accurate to claim that the Romance languages are in any meaningful sense "Latin".

The weaker (and more reasonable) claim is that learning Latin improves your ability to recognize words and (very basic) structures in its descendants.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#212

Post by petre »

favorited wrote: post #194
School-Cotton wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speakers of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and various other lesser-known languages and dialects. All of these are directly descended from Latin in exactly the same way that today's English is descended from 1900s English, just over a longer period.

I think that's pretty disingenuous. The fact that my cousins and myself are around doesn't mean that my grandparents aren't dead. Latin is certainly a dead language, even though it has living descendants.

It's very much used in science for naming things, for studying old literature and also in the Catholic Church. We also had Latin courses in highschool. Also many words in many European languages, including Englush, have Latin or Greek roots.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#213

Post by School-Cotton »

djannzjkzxn wrote: post #206
School-Cotton wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 1900-AD English "a dead language" because nobody who spoke it natively is still alive? What about 1800, 1700, or 1000? What year did English die and if it did indeed die, what are we speaking now? The reasons for considering English circa 1000 and English circa 2020 to be "different stages of the same language" but Latin and French to be "different languages" are an arbitrary cultural distinction not rooted in sci…

The natural conclusion to this argument is that everyone on earth is speaking the same language, because they all descended from the Mitochondrial Eve’s utterances 150000 years ago.

No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scientific one that can be answered objectively.

(Tangent -- certainly not all languages are descended from a hypothetical Proto-World, since we have examples of brand new languages forming: any creole languages, or Nicaraguan Sign Language. Whether most of the major language families are descended from a Proto-World is very much an open question, and probably one that will never be answered, since even if say, English and Navajo are genetically related, they diverged so long before we had written records that no trace remains.)

In any case, there's a meaningful difference between a language gradually changing over hundreds of years such that the newer varieties are quite different from the old ones, and a language truly dying, because it has exactly one remaining native speaker, and that person dies.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#214

Post by wbl »

skybrian wrote: post #83
umvi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or is it just because no one uses it? Apple used to run ad campaigns about how Macs were immune to viruses and therefore highly secure. Turns out enough people just weren't using Mac, and viruses started popping up once it went mainstream.

Have there been Mac viruses that actually spread user-to-user in the wild? The articles I've seen talk about malware, which is different. Also the occasional proof-of-concept.

Elk Cloner

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#215

Post by overgard »

lolinder wrote: post #128
favorited wrote: post #50

It's definitely not a dead language – a new Fortran front-end has recently been accepted into the LLVM project, joining Clang. So LLVM's only in-tree supported languages (excluding the various IRs) will be C, C++, Objective-C, and Fortran. It had been scheduled for merge into the LLVM monorepo 2 days ago, but has been delayed pending some additional architecture review.

Latin was dead long before it stopped being used in written works. It died when it stopped being spoken and stopped changing. I don't know if Fortran would be considered dead by the "no longer adapting" definition, but that it's still in use isn't proof it's alive.

Fortran is doing fine in scientific computing.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#217

Post by School-Cotton »

woodruffw wrote: post #211
School-Cotton wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speakers of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and various other lesser-known languages and dialects. All of these are directly descended from Latin in exactly the same way that today's English is descended from 1900s English, just over a longer period.

I studied (classical, not ecclesiastical) Latin for about 8 years, and I don't think it's accurate to claim that the Romance languages are in any meaningful sense "Latin". The weaker (and more reasonable) claim is that learning Latin improves your ability to recognize words and (very basic) structures in its descendants.

Latin and the Romance languages are indeed very different, but their similarities are much stronger than just vocabulary. The Romance languages have lost noun cases and gained prepositions, fixed word order, and definite articles, but they retain noun genders (though without neuter), remnants of the case system in pronouns ("je", "me", "moi"), many of the same verb tenses, and the subjunctive/indicative moods, to give a few examples.

Anyway, my point is that it's an error to say that Latin "stopped changing". Other languages have changed similar amounts: modern Americans can't understand Beowulf, modern Greeks can't understand Homer, and modern Chinese people can't understand Confucious, but nobody would claim that English or Greek or Chinese died and stopped changing. The fact that people call Latin, but not English, a "dead language" is purely due to the fact that the different stages of English all happen to be called "English".

In an alternate world where Latin was exactly the same as it was in the past, and Italian is exactly the same as it is now, but Latin had never spread outside of Italy, I suspect that we would today call Latin "Old Italian" (or perhaps we would call Italian "Modern Latin"), and nobody would be having this discussion, despite the scientific/linguistic facts being identical to what they are in our reality.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#218

Post by jjdredd »

overgard wrote: post #215
lolinder wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latin was dead long before it stopped being used in written works. It died when it stopped being spoken and stopped changing. I don't know if Fortran would be considered dead by the "no longer adapting" definition, but that it's still in use isn't proof it's alive.

Fortran is doing fine in scientific computing.

In physics it's being replaced by C++ even where it requires rewriting lots of code that's already implemented and tested.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#219

Post by tobmlt »

biswaroop wrote: post #204
tobmlt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! Seconding what you said: A key aspect is that it’s very easy to write fast matrix math in Fortran. Vectorized operations are downright pythonic! I was amazed how much more complex things were when moving to C++ (as opposed to C or C written in cpp files which you’ll find in academia and some books). Of course, that ease is a hazard when all the modern (i.e. fun) sci-eng software development is in C++. Do not gro…

> Do not grow complacent in school, ye numerical methods researchers! Write your stuff in C++. The job market awaits. Could you elaborate a bit on this? I think I know what you mean, but I'd like to hear more if you don't mind.

Sure - I am speaking broadly of the job market for computational programmers outside of academia and national labs, and I'd better say that I am in the USA. So if you did a masters or PhD in CFD, or the finite element for structures, (and I wager also, E&M/Maxwell, computational physics, and numerical simulation generally (a catch all because the boundaries are fuzzy), but I think "as it goes in CFD and FEA for structures, so it goes in other numerical domains...?"), then it's quite possible you came from a school where your professor(s) wrote in old style C++ (or maybe straight up procedural C), or maybe used only the most basic features of Fortran 90 or worse (F77). The main thing is that while you did something noteworthy in your field to get your degree in engineering simulation or computational physics, you used a language, or language variant, that is not common anymore in _actively_ developed projects commercially. So, outside of academia and national labs, which are hard to get into if you are coming in from say, a state school with fewer connections (and did not intern somewhere as you had research obligations at school, say), in commercial code bases, as far as I have seen, hiring "from without" looks generally for lots of C++ computational/numerical experience.

Not such a big deal if you are a pure-researcher in, say, CFD, and not such a big deal in a national lab, where the big codebase may be FORTRAN anyway (caps to denote old school code bases). But it really limits your mobility not to be "C++ first". Lastly, if you land a job at a big numerical analysis company, you may be looking after legacy products forever if you are "just a Fortran person".

Well, this is obviously anecdotal. Sorry to state such bald opinions. But it's what I've seen, and really would have been helpful to know as I was going through school. I wrote a lot of Fortran and Python. It's left me playing catch up and it could have been avoided with comparative ease compared to my time budget now.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#220

Post by woodruffw »

School-Cotton wrote: post #217
woodruffw wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I studied (classical, not ecclesiastical) Latin for about 8 years, and I don't think it's accurate to claim that the Romance languages are in any meaningful sense "Latin". The weaker (and more reasonable) claim is that learning Latin improves your ability to recognize words and (very basic) structures in its descendants.

Latin and the Romance languages are indeed very different, but their similarities are much stronger than just vocabulary. The Romance languages have lost noun cases and gained prepositions, fixed word order, and definite articles, but they retain noun genders (though without neuter), remnants of the case system in pronouns ("je", "me", "moi"), many of the same verb tenses, and the subjunctive/indicative moods, to giv…

> The fact that people call Latin, but not English, a "dead language" is purely due to the fact that the different stages of English all happen to be called "English".

I don't think this is the case: the language that Beowulf is written in is normally referred to as Old English. Chaucer is Middle English. Shakespeare is Early Modern English. William Makepeace Thackeray is Victorian English.

IMO, it's reasonable to assert that each of these are "dead" in some meaningful way: even Early Modern and Victorian English, despite their intelligibility, are simply not spoken by any group of current-day English speakers.

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