Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by thicknavyrain on Sunday October 15, 2017 @01:05PM
(#15477983)
Pretty much just size! There was about 20,000 lines of it, it's legacy code that has been gradually added to since the 1980s, so it would have taken a while to rewrite all the parts to work with each other. Perhaps some day though.
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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by pbhjpbhj on Sunday October 15, 2017 @01:28PM
(#15478069)
What's the code do? [physics grad level description would be fine]
It must surely be generic equipment management, you're not running experiments in physics that are > 30 years old, surely?
Started in the 80s doesn't mean the code is 30 years old, as they keep adding to it and modifying it in Fortran. Plus most of the analysis part is probably just math routines that don't need modification ever after.
Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by pbhjpbhj on Monday October 16, 2017 @04:07AM
(#15481602)
Doesn't mean it isn't c.37 years old either ... I think we need specifics to progress this conversation usefully.
Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by rxhernandez on Sunday October 15, 2017 @01:36PM
(#15478100)
20,000 lines of code really doesn't seem like that much. I probably output that much in about 2-3 months of biomedical research so there has to be more to it than that.
>> legacy code that has been gradually added to since the 1980s
> 20,000 lines of code really doesn't seem like that much.
It's not "20k lines of code" but "n lines of code that grew organically over decades to 20k lines" - with the help of probably way more than 100 people who all are not trained as developers. I think it's a safe bet to say the current state only has a faint memory of being a consistent code base.
Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by geezerjay on Sunday October 15, 2017 @06:58PM
(#15479821)
> 20,000 lines of code really doesn't seem like that much.
Once I spent close to a month hunting down a subtle but nasty bug in a number crunching module which was perhaps around 2k LoC. Writing code is very easy. Verifying and validating number crunching code is very hard and very time consuming.
Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by coldtea on Sunday October 15, 2017 @01:43PM
(#15478132)
20,000 lines of code casually churned out in 2-3 months will be a nightmare to a) understand, b) maintain, much less to rewrite...
Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by cocoablazing on Sunday October 15, 2017 @03:26PM
(#15478794)
It sounds like he’s talking about scripts generated for research, rather than code for components intended to be persistent.
Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by rxhernandez on Sunday October 15, 2017 @05:33PM
(#15479421)
Precisely this.
Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by CalChris on Sunday October 15, 2017 @08:41PM
(#15480149)
20,000 lines of your code is one thing. 20,000 lines of someone else's code is another thing entirely. 20,000 lines of many other people's code can be insane.