Why physicists still use Fortran

Re:Why physicists still use Fortran by luthaf on Sunday December 18, 2016 @08:23PM (#13208813)

Yep, Julia is a very nice language with very good performances. But I abandoned it because it is not (yet?) oriented toward library development, and more usable in exploratory style.

I ran into issues a year ago when trying to organize a library with more than 8000 loc, when the "dump everything into a global namespace" started to be more a hassle and less a nice way to get stuff done. I am waiting for it to stabilize a bit before giving a second try.

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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran by photon-torpedo on Sunday December 18, 2016 @11:18PM (#13209484)

Could you elaborate on why you felt the need to "dump everything into the global namespace"? For quite a long time now, you can use modules in Julia to keep things in separate namespaces. With "import MyModule" (instead of "using MyModule") things will not enter the global namespace, but will need to be qualified, like "MyModule.myfunction(...)". I feel this is very much like Python. You could even introduce abbreviations for the modules, using "const mm = MyModule" (admittedly, Python's "import...as" is cleaner).

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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran by luthaf on Monday December 19, 2016 @11:17AM (#13212353)

Yes, but `using MyModule` is (was?) the default and preferred way to use a module. Which is equivalent to recommend everyone to do `from module import *` in Python.

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