Re: Shortage of Fortran Programmers

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006, Sue wrote:

After about 40 years of using Fortran on any mainframe, then
mini-computers (DEC) and then Sun and SGI workstations, I have just
obtained my first PC. Now I am trying to decide on which Fortran
compiler to obtain, preferably with a graphics systems library. Does
anyone have some suggestions? Ideas will be very much welcome.

Be prepared to consider big changes in the way you approach a problem.

I come from a similar background. In my field (remote sensing) Fortran is rarely for graphics anymore, mostly due to the lack of portable support for the data types used for images, but also because there is a wealth of excellent (mostly open source) tools. The new tools are used by a large community who are good at finding bugs before the get to me. Interpreted languages are "fast enough" on modern hardware. In the days of RISC workstations, a typical project used 512x512 images and a total of 10GB data. These days our typical project starts with a few TB, which are processed down to 100GB. We used bzip2 compression (compress once, decompress often). Bzip2 is the largest consumer of CPU cycles on our
machines -- most of the algorithms we use now run in less time than it
takes to transfer the data.

Most of my career I've been the "goto" guy when sums didn't work out as expected. On the mainframes and risc machines I was handling "new", e.g., unreported, bugs at a rate of more than 1 a month. Each time someone came to me with a problem I had to determine whether the user code was correct, look for a workaround, and if a bug fix was required, prepare test cases and run diagnostics.

Today, the rate of problems encountered is much higher (several per week), but for the mainstream packages it is very rare to find a really new bug. The majority of problems can be resolved by the user with google or the developer's bug tracking system.

You don't mention whart sort of graphics you need: images, line art, publication quality, etc. I use S-plus (the free R "clone") for line art and some images, and RSI's IDL (mostly the embedded interpeter in the free NASA package that is one of our "mission critical" tools, or the free gdl clone) for remote sensing images.

--
George N. White III <aa056@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

.

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