Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : tenser
Date : Thu Jan 11 2024 03:05 am

On 10 Jan 2024 at 08:18a, Dr. What pondered and said...
 
 DW> Which is why those old languages are still out there.  FORTRAN, for
 DW> example, is still used and has been updated.  I think we're up to
 DW> FORTRAN 90 now.

Fortran 2018, actually.  It only bears a passing resemblance
to FORTRAN-77, let along -66 or IV (or earlier).

There's an old joke.  Q: "What language will scientists and
engineers be programming in in 50 years?"  A: "I don't know,
but it will be called Fortran."

 DW> But other languages are trying to take over.  Julia is a good example
 DW> here.  It's very much like Python, but it's also very fast with a focus
 DW> on math.  A good potential replacement for FORTRAN.
 DW> 
 DW> At some point, these applications need to be rewritten.  Oh, now I will
 DW> have nightmares about the FORTRAN IV code that I worked on in 1984 that,
 DW> even though I converted it to VS FORTRAN at that time, is still running
 DW> and hasn't been rewritten into something more modern.

A friend of mine, now retired, is a former architect for
high performance systems at Intel (did a PhD in transputers,
worked on HPC-stuff his entire career).  He likes to say,
"Fortran pays my salary."  He didn't personally program in
it himself, but he had some very convincing arguments
about _why_ Fortran was still used and would (and should)
continue to be.  Not only is modern Fortran actually a
pretty reasonable language, it turns out that a lot of the
design of the language lends itself to very aggressive
optimizations; the aliasing rules, for instance, mean that
the compiler can automatically parallalize lots of programs
in a way that other languages (so far) haven't been able to
match.  Also, "the math hasn't changed."

All that said, it'll be interesting to keep an eye on Julia
and see where it goes.  And this is to say nothing about
Matlab, Mathematica, and other interactive environments that
have Fortran-like languages and are popular in science
and engineering.

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