[Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place

[Prentice Bisbal]

That's exactly what I suspected. I guess 13 years is like an eternity in 
the modern "Speed of the Internet" world we live in, but may not have 
been such a slow evolution time of the pre-Internet days.

Prentice

On 10/19/20 2:53 PM, Renfro, Michael wrote:
>
> Minor point of pedagogy from my place in the "learned FORTRAN 77 in 
> 1990" crowd: your instructor's options would have been:
>
>   * standard FORTRAN 77
>   * vendor-specific dialect of FORTRAN (VAX or otherwise)
>   * maybe a pre-release of FORTRAN 90? Wasn't released and
>     standardized until 1991-92.
>
> Never mind the availability of texts for same.
>
> *From: *Beowulf <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org>
> *Date: *Monday, October 19, 2020 at 12:06 PM
> *To: *beowulf at beowulf.org <beowulf at beowulf.org>
> *Subject: *Re: [Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: 
> Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place
>
>
> On 10/19/20 10:28 AM, Douglas Eadline wrote:
> > --snip--
> >
> >> Unfortunately the presumption seems to be that the old is deficient
> >> because it is old, and "my generation” didn't invent it (which is
> >> clearly perverse; I see no rush to replace English, French, … 
> which are
> >> all older than any of our programming languages, and which adapt, as do
> >> our programming languages).
> >>
> > I think this has a lot to do with the Fortran situation. In these 
> "modern"
> > times, software seems to have gone from "releases" to a "sliding
> > constant release" cycle and anything not released in the past few
> > months is "old."
> >
> > How many people here will wait a 2-6 months before installing
> > a "new version" of some package in production to make sure there
> > are no major issues. And of course keep older version options
> > with software modules. Perhaps because I've been at this a while,
> > I have a let it "mellow a bit" approach to shinny new software.
> >
> > I find it odd that Fortran gets placed in the "old software box"
> > because it works while new languages with their constant feature
> > churn and versions break dependency trees all over the place,
> > and somehow that is good thing. Now get off my lawn.
> >
> > --
> > Doug
> >
> Now we're starting to veer of course a little here, but what the hell...
>
> I think that one of the problems with Fortran is a complete
> misunderstanding of it's purpose. People are always shocked when I tell
> them the scientists I support are "still" using Fortran. Many people
> think that C and C++ replaced Fortran, but that is not true. C was
> designed to do low-level programming for tasks like writing operating
> systems, and C++ is just an extension of the C language to support
> Object-Oriented Programming. Both C and C++ are lower-level and more
> general purpose than Fortran.
>
> Fortran is a domain-specific language, meaning it was meant for a
> special purpose, which in this case is doing mathematical operations,
> and it's very good for those sorts of things. It's trivial to create
> multidimensional arrays in Fortran, which is useful for many math
> operations, but C doesn't even support anything beyond 1D arrays. Sure
> you can mimic multidimensional arrays by keeping track of stride length,
> etc., but that's a lot of work, and I'm betting that's work a lot of
> scientists would rather not do. That's just one example of Fortran being
> friendlier for science. I'm sure there are other examples, but I'm not a
> programmer, and definitely NOT a Fortran programmer.
>
> I think the main reason most people look at Fortran as an old and
> outdated language is because it stuck to the "punch card" formatting
> long after punch cards and punch card readers disappeared, but I'm not
> sure who to blame for that. Do I blame my freshman "Programming for
> Engineers" instructor who taught me Fortran 77 in 1991, or do I blame
> whoever maintains the Fortran standard for not updating it before then?
> (I honestly don't know what the latest version of Fortran was in the
> fall of 1991).
>
> Prentice
>
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit 
> https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbeowulf.org%2Fcgi-bin%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fbeowulf&data=04%7C01%7CRenfro%40tntech.edu%7C8486662b21394e7039e408d8745157c5%7C66fecaf83dc04d2cb8b8eff0ddea46f0%7C1%7C0%7C637387240011631429%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=lpfkkIZiPQ734YkMGHzI3M27w5RmZhkJ8dDbAD765dQ%3D&reserved=0
>
-- 
Prentice Bisbal
Lead Software Engineer
Research Computing
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
http://www.pppl.gov

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20201019/2d9704b0/attachment.html>