Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
college-basketball.si.com
Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
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Re: Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
#2The point of this submission being....?
The fact that someone runs statistics calculations in Fortran (a language whose most recent standard is dated 2008) should be shocking only to the recent generation of coders who have become "code hipsters." The guys looking for the Next Big Thing™ in programming languages.
These are the guys trying to cram Python into every possible goddamned use case, whether that be embedded systems or computational fluid dynamics. Whether it's the right tool for the job or not. The same guys who are implementing a Ruby interpreter in Haskell, running on a VM written in Rust. Why? Because damn it, their language of choice is shiny and new, and therefore it must be the best.
Nope. You use the best tool for the job. If you're already familiar with a language and that language is perfectly well-suited for the task at hand (in this case mathematics) then you use that language.
Fortran is old, which means it's seen a lot of development. The compiler optimizations are very, very efficient and Fortran code runs extremely fast. In fact, Fortran was explicitly designed for running mathematics algorithms on computers.
tl;dr Fortran is actually a great choice for this application and I hate hipsters.
Re: Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
#3If your emphasis is on crunching numbers Fortran is the best.
Re: Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
#4I'm guessing the title was chosen because the submitter thought coding in Fortran was stupid, or old, or whatever. The reality is that Fortran has been updated frequently and for what he's doing seems like a reasonable choice (plus he probably has a store of routines that he likes to use for certain analyses).
Old language != Bad language
From TFA:
"SI: Is it true you still code in Fortran?
JS: Yeah, what’s wrong with that? It’s a good language. Fortran is real good for doing mathematics and running it real quickly. I’m not doing Photoshopping or anything like that. I’m just running numbers."
Re: Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
#5Fortan isn't dead, by far.
There is a lot of scientific and industrial code (in astronomy, aeronautics, ...) that is in Fortran. And I'm not talking about legacy stuff that is only in maintenance mode. These codes are still evolving and get new functionalities. They're not in Fortran only for legacy reasons (though that plays some part). They're in Fortran because Fortan is still the right tool for the job.
Scientific computing, where is IO is pretty much never the bottleneck, is a completely different world from web development. Python/Numpy is usable for some tasks, but only because it delegates a lot of stuff to underlying FOrtran code..
Re: Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
#6I'm guessing the title was chosen because the submitter thought coding in Fortran was stupid, or old, or whatever. The reality is that Fortran has been updated frequently and for what he's doing seems like a reasonable choice (plus he probably has a store of routines that he likes to use for certain analyses). Old language != Bad language From TFA: "SI: Is it true you still code in Fortran? JS: Yeah, what’s wrong wit…
Fortran is still pretty much the only choice if you want the maximum possible performance for your parallel math computations. The only downside is that you have to vectorize a lot of things by hand if you aren't doing nice flat data parallelism.
Re: Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
#7If your emphasis is on crunching numbers Fortran is the best.
Or, rather, if your emphasis is on crunching numbers, and so many of them that performance is always a big issue, then Fortran is pretty much the best.
Not all number crunching is the same.
Re: Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
#8Fortan isn't dead, by far. There is a lot of scientific and industrial code (in astronomy, aeronautics, ...) that is in Fortran. And I'm not talking about legacy stuff that is only in maintenance mode. These codes are still evolving and get new functionalities. They're not in Fortran only for legacy reasons (though that plays some part). They're in Fortran because Fortan is still the right tool for the job. Scientifi…
Yeah, anyone who has installed numpy, matplotlib, etc has probably noticed that you need a Fortran compiler to build the native extensions...
Re: Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
#9The point of this submission being....? The fact that someone runs statistics calculations in Fortran (a language whose most recent standard is dated 2008) should be shocking only to the recent generation of coders who have become "code hipsters." The guys looking for the Next Big Thing™ in programming languages. These are the guys trying to cram Python into every possible goddamned use case, whether that be embedded…
Is Fortran actually the best choice for this application? I don't know how heavy the calculations are for sports analytics, but I'm guessing it's less advanced than scientific simulations. Who cares how numerically efficient your code is if you use 10x the lines than a modern language and spend half your time struggling to maintain it.
Re: Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin
#10So do most of the world's cosmologists, you know boring stuff like the fabric of the universe, the beginning of time, the hunt for dark matter.
It's parallelisable - if that's a word.
Admittedly the stuff I have seen is all written without knowledge of the maxim "write your code as if the next person to fix your code is a mad axe murderer who knows where you live."
But they still unlock the secrets of the universe with it, even with unusual naming conventions.