Re:Why physicists still use Fortran
by troymc on Sunday December 18, 2016 @03:55PM
(#13207587)
When I was doing my graduate studies in astrodynamics (spacecraft trajectory design) at Purdue University circa 2003, we worked closely with the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and got to use a lot of their excellent astrodynamics code (used for missions like Galileo and Cassini). It was all Fortran.
I heard that there was an effort at JPL to convert over to using Python. I'm not sure how that went. Maybe they were just writing Python bindings for their Fortran code? I know that much of SciPy consists of Python bindings for Fortran and C code [1].
The software I used to do "nonlinear programming" (i.e. parameter optimization), called NPOPT, was also written in Fortran.
Re:Why physicists still use Fortran
by mturmon on Sunday December 18, 2016 @06:53PM
(#13208463)
The Python replacement succeeded - I slightly know the people involved, who got an award for the work. But I don't use the library so I don't know if the wrapper approach was used. That would be perfectly legit IMHO.
I heard that there was an effort at JPL to convert over to using Python. I'm not sure how that went. Maybe they were just writing Python bindings for their Fortran code? I know that much of SciPy consists of Python bindings for Fortran and C code [1].
The software I used to do "nonlinear programming" (i.e. parameter optimization), called NPOPT, was also written in Fortran.
[1] https://www.scipy.org/scipylib/faq.html#how-can-scipy-be-fas...