61–70 of 136 posts
A nuclear reactor simulator I ported from UNIX to Win32 in 1998 was several million lines of code written by nuclear engineers (not software engineers) and physicists. It's over 60 years old now.
I think the assumption that "old is bad" is the cause of many, many, many foolish decisions. Useless code rewrites, company reorganizations that are not significant improvements, and many other bad ideas hinge on this Worship Of The New. Why are we using an alphabetic system originally developed c. 1800BC? It's old, we should switch to new writing systems every 10 years because they're new, right :-)?
Older is not better. Newer is not better. Better is better. There's no point in switching something if the destination isn't better, and even if it's clearly better, it needs to be so much better that it's worth the switching cost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took until C99 for C to have complex numbers and `restrict`. Those are two features FORTRAN has had for a much longer time, right?
And like in everything C, unlike Fortran, there is no way for the compiler to validate if restrict is being used properly. Use it wrong, break the compiler assumptions and the bug hunting fun starts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open question: why are multi-dimensional arrays, and matrices specifically, so neglected in almost every other language? They map well to practically freakin' everything , for what seems like.. not that much effort on the language design side, but an enormous amount of tedious, duplicated effort on the user side.
This is a great question and I hope you get an answer to this. The number of woeful ad-hoc solutions I've seen to people handling matrix data in Java/C# for what should've been otherwise very basic analysis ... Something with pandas-like capability in a lower level language would be amazing.
More like numpy than pandas but I've used x-tensor (c++) with great success in several projects: https://xtensor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
High performance scientific computing is very much still a FORTRAN, C, and C++ game. And of those, FORTRAN has some compelling advantages in terms of first-class built-in support for multidimensional arrays, and quite excellent compilers. And, as others have noted, until the `restrict` keyword in C99, there were optimizations in FORTRAN that were not even possible in C. I mostly used C for my (small-scale) HPC work i…
Open question: why are multi-dimensional arrays, and matrices specifically, so neglected in almost every other language? They map well to practically freakin' everything , for what seems like.. not that much effort on the language design side, but an enormous amount of tedious, duplicated effort on the user side.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open question: why are multi-dimensional arrays, and matrices specifically, so neglected in almost every other language? They map well to practically freakin' everything , for what seems like.. not that much effort on the language design side, but an enormous amount of tedious, duplicated effort on the user side.
This is a great question and I hope you get an answer to this. The number of woeful ad-hoc solutions I've seen to people handling matrix data in Java/C# for what should've been otherwise very basic analysis ... Something with pandas-like capability in a lower level language would be amazing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open question: why are multi-dimensional arrays, and matrices specifically, so neglected in almost every other language? They map well to practically freakin' everything , for what seems like.. not that much effort on the language design side, but an enormous amount of tedious, duplicated effort on the user side.
This is a great question and I hope you get an answer to this. The number of woeful ad-hoc solutions I've seen to people handling matrix data in Java/C# for what should've been otherwise very basic analysis ... Something with pandas-like capability in a lower level language would be amazing.
High performance scientific computing is very much still a FORTRAN, C, and C++ game. And of those, FORTRAN has some compelling advantages in terms of first-class built-in support for multidimensional arrays, and quite excellent compilers. And, as others have noted, until the `restrict` keyword in C99, there were optimizations in FORTRAN that were not even possible in C. I mostly used C for my (small-scale) HPC work i…
Open question: why are multi-dimensional arrays, and matrices specifically, so neglected in almost every other language? They map well to practically freakin' everything , for what seems like.. not that much effort on the language design side, but an enormous amount of tedious, duplicated effort on the user side.
Most languages that prioritize Fortran code interop also adopt column-major order, but most other languages that support multidimensional arrays do row-major order. I'm not sure why Fortran went column-major but because it did, a lot of libraries designed for Fortran callers (such as LAPACK and all BLAS implementations) need to be told that input arrays have been transposed when they come from languages like C++.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-_and_column-major_order
The actual title is, "Why are Climate models written in programming languages from 1950?". I think the assumption that "old is bad" is the cause of many, many, many foolish decisions. Useless code rewrites, company reorganizations that are not significant improvements, and many other bad ideas hinge on this Worship Of The New. Why are we using an alphabetic system originally developed c. 1800BC? It's old, we should s…
High performance scientific computing is very much still a FORTRAN, C, and C++ game. And of those, FORTRAN has some compelling advantages in terms of first-class built-in support for multidimensional arrays, and quite excellent compilers. And, as others have noted, until the `restrict` keyword in C99, there were optimizations in FORTRAN that were not even possible in C. I mostly used C for my (small-scale) HPC work i…
Open question: why are multi-dimensional arrays, and matrices specifically, so neglected in almost every other language? They map well to practically freakin' everything , for what seems like.. not that much effort on the language design side, but an enormous amount of tedious, duplicated effort on the user side.
So a language with multidimensional arrays is in a lose-lose position of having to choose to either satisfy the linear algebraists at the cost of alienating general-purpose programmers who want to do pointer arithmetic, or else satisfy the latter while alienating the core demographic for multidimensional numeric arrays.
Personally, I’m fine with (or even slightly prefer) one-based for my own scientific computing, despite starting with C, since it really is more elegant for linear algebra, and I have never found myself needing or wanting to do pointer arithmetic in a language that does have good multidimensional arrays — but clearly it is still a major turn-off to many others.