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[-] Buttons@programming.dev 37 points 1 month ago

Fortran is still a good language for some purposes I think.

And I feel the same way, C++ tries to solve the problem of having too many features by adding more features.

[-] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 month ago

Don't get me wrong. There is still a time and a place for Fortran. And this will also likely always be the case for C++. But I'm not sure it is entirely wise to choose it if you're creating a new project anymore.

[-] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 month ago

I'm barely competent at programming. What is the use case for Fortran, besides maintaining ancient code?

[-] sukhmel@programming.dev 14 points 1 month ago

A lot of computational heavy tasks for science were done in Fortran at least ten years ago (and I think still are). I was told that's mainly because Fortran has a good deal of libraries for just that, and it was widely taught in academia so this is a common ground between the older and newer generations.

I think it may be gradually superseded by Python, but I don't know if it is

[-] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 month ago

A lot of the underlying libraries in python are actually written in Fortran (or were when they were conceived, and the Fortran components later replaced). Numpy, for example, was originally pretty much a wrapper on top of BLAS and LAPACK.

[-] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 month ago

It was designed from its very start to be used for numerical computing. So the language it built around it and it sort of excels in that use case.

This used to be the holy bible of numerical methods, if you want to see some sample code: https://s3.amazonaws.com/nrbook.com/book_F210.html

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

You might be right, but I have heard that song a lot of times, python, java, ml, pascal, obscure webdev.languages, AI will do it, typescript, etc etc etc

I'd go with a better python than rust, you can put that "once in a lifetime asm optimized memsafe multi threaded code" in a package and just use it from python. But python has GIL and you can't just remove it so who knows what will be the next shiny thing? Probably several languages, like for easy peasy stuff up to hardcore multi threaded memory safe stuff. Gotta push us oldtimers out in some way, right :-) ?

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 6 points 1 month ago

But python has GIL and you can't just remove it so

https://docs.python.org/3/using/configure.html#cmdoption-disable-gil

The GIL appears to be slowly going away.

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

What I meant with that is if you remove the GIL, the people have to understand parallel access to data and a lot of orher quite complicated paradigms, which defeats, IMO, the whole idea of having a "simpler" language paired with a more versatile but more complex and complicated language, like C++.

[-] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

... for the very reason that Fortran you can grasp in an evening.

this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
201 points (99.0% liked)

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