Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)

Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by cm2187 on Monday October 16, 2017 @07:15AM (#15482394)

I would have thought a more natural candidate for scientists would be languages like Java or C# rather than python: you get both a language that is relatively easy to write, with no memory to manage, no hornet nest of pointers on pointers, nice debuggers, lots of 3rd party libraries, while a the same time getting the performance of static typing / running compiled code once the program has been JIT (which for long running code is a negligible cost). It's never going to be as fast as a C++ or Fortran, but you get a compromise between performance and ease of use, while I understand python is going the other extreme, i.e. all ease of use at the expense of performance. Doesn't matter for a simple simulation, but for some large data analysis projects, I assume it could make a big difference.

But that doesn't seem the case. The choice seems to be between python and c++/fortran. Does anyone know why?

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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by asfdsfggtfd on Monday October 16, 2017 @07:42AM (#15482505)

1. Nice bindings already exist for numerical libraries in python. It is more accurate in some ways to say that scientists are using a domain specific language based on numpy than they are using python.

2. The choice is either "fastest possible" or "I just don't care how long it takes" - for either development or run time. There is usually no middle ground.

3. Tooling - the scientist is most likely using a text editor not an IDE (especially when they start working). Fortran and python are both low enough on boilerplate to not need IDE support.

4. Abstraction level. Scientists in general don't bother care about abstraction level at all. Procedural programing's abstractions are usually more than enough for them (and may actually be the correct level for some numerical work - think cache misses vs. hits).

5. Some areas of science do use Java (check out imagej for example).

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