Re: A petition to J3 apropos FORTRAN's future

beliavsky_at_aol.com
Date: 03/23/04 

Date: 22 Mar 2004 15:54:35 -0800

Richard Maine <nospam@see.signature> wrote in message news:<m14qsgixyb.fsf@macfortran.local>...
> analyst41@hotmail.com (analyst41) writes:
>
> > ... but since Capitalism drives everything in the world,
>
> and various other broad unsupported generalizations, ad hominem
> attacks, plus a few obscenities thrown in just to make sure
> that we can appropriately place the level of argument. Perhaps
> he should have paid more attention to some of mother's admonitions
> before labeling other people as childish, tired, quaint,
> pathetic, and other such technical terms. But anyway...

I also dislike arrogant tone of analyst41, but he seems to be an
experienced Fortranner who makes some reasonable points, in an
obnoxious way. He wrote

'When the C onslaught came, Fortran folded like an accordion and gave
up everything except "number crunching by people who are not
professional programmers".

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.'

It is an exagerration to say Fortran "folded", and I do not know if
the particular features he cites would have made a difference. But
there is a big danger in Fortran's current status as a niche numerical
language. The vast majority of programmers are not doing "scientific
computing", and few of them are knowledgable about modern Fortran. In
my company, and I suspect most companies, there are far more of the
non-scientific than scientific programmers, and someone such as the
"Chief Information Officer", who decides what technologies get used,
is much more likely to be drawn from the former group.

In theory, programmers would just "use the best language for the job",
as is commonly advised, and the fact the Fortran is not best language
for writing Windows GUIs (for example) would not affect its use for
number-crunching. But there are reasons, both real and silly, why one
language (currently, C++) tends to push out others. Some real reasons
are that
(1) buying compilers for several languages costs more money, with the
compiler for less-used language typically being more expensive, since
there are fewer users to amortize the fixed cost.
(2) mixed-language programs can be harder to debug and understand, and
also more fragile because they depend on two different products
working together
(3) there are more tools and public-domain code in the dominant
language

The silly reasons stem from the fact that programmers often have false
notions about languages they do not use, and the people who do use
them.

In theory, not being well-suited for writing an operating system or
GUI should not preclude other uses of a language, but it seems to
often work out that way.

Point (1) above is being addressed by the G95 projects and the free or
low-price "non-commercial" compilers marketed by vendors. (2) will be
addressed in Fortran 2003 by C interoperability features, but do not
count on many C programmers learning or caring about them. Sites like
www.fortran.com and www.fortranlib.com ameliorate the third problem.

Relevant Pages

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