Re: A petition to J3 apropos FORTRAN's future

From: analyst41 (analyst41_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 03/22/04 

Date: 22 Mar 2004 09:02:34 -0800

"James Giles" <jamesgiles@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:<t2o7c.12802$PY1.289534@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>...
> analyst41 wrote:
> ...
> > Instead of taking C on directly (all that was needed was either
> > intercallability with C for some low level stuff or actually
> > replicating a small number of C's dirty features in Fortran) Fortran
> > tried to defend only its alleged core, but since it was a
> > fundamentally flawed strategy, C and its descendants have essentially
> > elimiated Fortran from "grown up" computing, quantitative or not.
>
> "Grown up"? I guess that's why most C code looks like it was
> written by a talentless eight year old?

It sure does - but since Capitalism drives everything in the world,
let us give C (to me C means C/C++/JAVA) its due - C being the
foundation of Microsoft ORACLE etc. - not to speak of innumerable C
applications (including quantitative ones) running in tax-paying
corporations does mean something.

C won the ultimate contest - it gets used. If we refuse to see that C
did something right - then thats truly childish.
>
> You keep coming up with this tired old argument. C didn't beat
> out Fortran alone - it beat out lots of other languages as well.
> Some of which (like Turing plus) had *all* the "dirty" features
> of C but was *vastly* better designed (ie. easier to write, read,
> verify, maintain, reuse, etc.). So, if the existence of C's "dirty"
> features was the death of Fortran, why did C also beat these
> other languages?

I don't give a flying *** about truly clean languages or languages
that did dirty things cleanly that got used by a grand total of <= 3
people even BEFORE C did them in.

That C has (probably) irreparably decimated Fortran's user base is a
fact. If my reasons why are incorrect - we should find the true
reasons and discover is there any way the user base can be brought
back. A REALLY tired argument in this regard would be "irrationality
of decision makers in software projects".

>
> In the real world, rather than the one you seem to live in, language
> popularity is not in any way correlated with features supported or
> quality of design. That, however, is not a reason to abandon quality
> design, or adopt bad features, or omit good features. You'd have
> us do all the above.

A lot of "good" features in Fortran 90 onwards are like one's mother's
admonitions "stand up straight", "get regular exercise", "eat fiber"
etc. They are actually good for you, except that real people don't
follow them.