Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by DannyBee on Sunday October 15, 2017 @05:56PM
(#15479534)
"Speed is not nearly as important now as it was 10-15 years ago."
Please try telling that to other users sometime.
They do not seem to agree.
What users? I do work in research and this is what I see almost every time -- doubling the number of CPUs available for a simulation is trivial; getting someone to rewrite existing code to make it twice as fast on the same CPU is hard.
I am not talking about interactive programs -- a slow browser is annoying. I am talking about scientific computing. This is just my experience, can you provide some counterexamples?
Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
by lostboys67 on Monday October 16, 2017 @04:37AM
(#15481717)
So more cores means you can simulate to a higher resolution
Speed is not nearly as important now as it was 10-15 years ago. A typical scientist's worstation has 20 CPU cores. If I want to use 100 CPUs for a few days, it is trivial and 1000 is easy to get. Thus the fact that Python is slow(er) does not bother me unless I am setting up something major.
What matters though, is the availability of libraries that let me reliably run my experiments. If there is a bug, it must be in my code, not the library -- a "discovery" caused by a software bug is humiliating. This is where Fortran shines and Python is not quite there yet -- the decades of beating on those libraries made them very well understood and trusted.