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Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

fortran.io

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Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#241

Post by raattgift »

7thaccount wrote: post #172
greglindahl wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's relevant, because... ?

How is it not? Someone said something about fighter jets being written in Fortran. Someone corrected them saying they aren't, but they are modeled using Fortran. I tried to add to the conversation by saying what they were written in assuming that would also be of interest to the person who made the original comment. I'm sorry this has perturbed you.

There is likely a lot more railway traffic control software written in Simula ( "The basic simulation kernel, the TTS module based on the SIMON/TTS system, is today implemented in Simula and running on a UNIX platform." https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ed7e/d90fbc57b7ee0473d41edb... [2008] -- last listed author works for and the work is funded by Banverket, the Swedish National Rail Administration ) than in Ruby, and yet it's still rubyonrails.org.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#242

Post by raattgift »

Stratoscope wrote: post #188
jblz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortran on Funicular :)

That goes well with COBOL on Cogs! Funicular railway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO9J7NsM0Ck Cog railway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYjj0rwriEA

You likely would recognize the melody of "Funiculì, Funiculà", an audio sample of which can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funicul%C3%AC,_Funicul%C3%A0

Amusingly, a short while ago I HN-commented on the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and nearby settlements. Vesuvius also destroyed the funicular that the song advertised, in a later eruption.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#243

Post by greglindahl »

ken wrote: post #239
greglindahl wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems that many CS folks don't think much of Fortran because their programming languages survey course professor made fun of Fortran 77. Fortran has moved on, even if you professor hasn't.

The opposite, in fact. My professor talked about the amazing things he did with Fortran. Then I had to learn it in order to find the bugs. I'd never use it by choice. I know of 4 major languages created in the 1950's: Lisp, Algol, Fortran, and Cobol. Lisp and Algol were brilliantly designed, years ahead of their time, and have inspired nearly every programming language since then. Fortran and Cobol not only look like…

You seem to be exhibiting the problem I describe -- Fortran 2018 is not the same as Fortran 77.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#244

Post by jofer »

tobmlt wrote: post #219
biswaroop wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 struc…

I'll second all of that. It's well worth actually learning C++ (and not C masquerading as C++) if you want to go into the broader scientific computing job market. I certainly wish I had focused more on "real" C++. I have maintained some very large C++ codebases, but I still don't really know C++, just "C with classes". Thankfully, C++ is not my day-job anymore.

I'd also give a quiet nod to trying to get familiar with modern dev-ops tooling. E.g. docker, kubernetes, and interacting with at least some forms of cloud storage. Get used to the idea that a bucket is not actually a directory, it's a hierarchy of prefixes and learn how to use that. Think of a dockerfile as learning how to write a makefile. It's worth learning the basics of, and it's not hard for simple things. HPC work has traditionally been a lot of fairly custom clusters (Condor, anyone?) or problems that are best solved with a lot of RAM on one machine. However, things are moving towards commodity solutions (i.e. "the cloud") or at the very least, common software layers. You don't need to understand the the ins and outs of managing a kubernetes cluster, but it's helpful to have used kubectl to spin up and debug a pod or two at some point.

However, I will say that there seem to be more Python-based jobs than C++ or Fortran jobs in the industry-based scientific computing world these days. Perhaps less so for fluid dynamics or finite element methods or other "simulation on a grid" problems, but there are a lot of python codebases out there in industry right now. I think it's very important to be comfortable working in higher level languages as well, and python is kinda becoming the lingua franca of a lot of sub-fields. For better or worse (I'm in the "better" camp), a lot of users are going to want a python library for what you're writing. It's best if you're used to "thinking in python" and can design a pythonic api.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#245

Post by colechristensen »

ironmagma wrote: post #170
colechristensen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still heavily used for numerical code in various places, especially aerospace (to avoid reverifying code with new languages or just to ensure new work can be accurately compared with old work) There's even a CUDA compiler. As I understand it, lack of pointers makes it possible for fortran compilers to parallelize code quite well.

Fortran does have pointers, though. [1] Maybe they are just not common for most math operations on matrices? [1] http://www.personal.psu.edu/jhm/f90/lectures/42.html

It has things called pointers, but they are significantly different than pointers in C. They can't return memory addresses and so there's no pointer arithmetic or other difficult to optimize actions.

And after writing a significant amount of fortran 90 code I didn't even know the feature existed...

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#246

Post by FpUser »

greglindahl wrote: post #180
FpUser wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C/C++ will be most likely used for many many decades ahead.

Yes? So will Cobol. So will Latin! I suspect discussing design choices might be more interesting than a popularity comparison.

Funny that you should mention it. To me it looks like web development is mostly driven by fashion rather then practical choices. Also I suspect that unless something radically good comes out (I do not consider Rust, Go and likes to be the case) C and C++ will stay very active, including new development. I actually do hope that this happens but so far no real candidate.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#247

Post by baddox »

School-Cotton wrote: post #213
djannzjkzxn wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

It's a question that linguists (who are scientists) strive to answer in ways that are useful to studying, reasoning about, and explaining language. It's not much different than the species problem in biology. Everyone knows that speciation happens gradually, but scientists still propose ways of defining and explaining speciation to aid in scientific inquiry. The labels and dividing lines themselves are not empirically observed, of course, but that doesn't mean they're unscientific or outside the purview of scientific inquiry.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#248

Post by School-Cotton »

baddox wrote: post #247
School-Cotton wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. It's a question that linguists (who are scientists) strive to answer in ways that are useful to studying, reasoning about, and explaining language. It's not much different than the species problem in biology. Everyon…

Do you have any examples of serious papers written by serious linguists debating whether X and Y are the same language or not?

I would be very surprised if such a thing exists.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#249

Post by baddox »

School-Cotton wrote: post #248
baddox wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's a question that linguists (who are scientists) strive to answer in ways that are useful to studying, reasoning about, and explaining language. It's not much different than the species problem in biology. Everyon…

Do you have any examples of serious papers written by serious linguists debating whether X and Y are the same language or not? I would be very surprised if such a thing exists.

As far as I know, there generally aren’t papers that contain debates between multiple linguists. Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts. But there are certainly many papers about dead languages, and about the lines between languages. You can look at pretty much any of the citations on Wikipedia articles about dead languages like a Middle English, or creole languages.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#250

Post by School-Cotton »

baddox wrote: post #249
School-Cotton wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples of serious papers written by serious linguists debating whether X and Y are the same language or not? I would be very surprised if such a thing exists.

As far as I know, there generally aren’t papers that contain debates between multiple linguists. Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts. But there are certainly many papers about dead languages, and about the lines between languages. You can look at pretty much any of the citations on Wikipedia articles about dead languages like a Middle English, or creole languages.

> Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts.

Sure they are, although a debate wouldn't be contained in one paper written collaboratively by debating authors, as you seem to imagine -- it would play out over a series of papers, each of which cites previous papers and claims they're wrong.

For example, Timm 1989[1] argues that modern Breton is a VSO language, disputing the claims of Varin 1979[2], who claims it is SVO, which in turn disputes the traditional understanding that it is indeed VSO.

Or the famous paper of Haspelmath 2011[3] citing many other authors' proposed approaches to word segmentation and arguing that they're all wrong (i.e., that "word" is not a meaningfully defined concept in linguistics).

Where are the papers that you claim exist about the lines between languages? If this is really something mainstream linguists care about, you should be able to give examples in non-fringe journals.

I just checked the citations on the Wikipedia article for Middle English like you suggested, and found zero papers about whether Middle English should be considered "the same language" as modern English. Can you tell me which ones specifically you mean?

[1]: Timm, L. (1989). "Word Order in 20th Century Breton". Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Vol. 7, No. 3, Special Celtic Issue, pp. 361-378 (https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/4047723)

[2]: Varin, A. (1979). "VSO and SVO Order in Breton". Archivum Linguisticum 10, pp. 83-101

[3]: Haspelmath, M. (2011). The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica, 45(1). (https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.002)

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