News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?. Parent comment

Re:Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of nume... by patagurbon on Tuesday September 23, 2025 @07:07PM (#45353976)
I didn’t say it was illegible. I said legibility is paramount, and I don’t think it makes the right trade offs in that regard to be a great teaching language

It’s far more legible for numerics than a lot of languages, maybe except Julia and Chapel. Julia was just driven in large part by teaching mathematics at mit and I think that shows

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of nume... by mastermage on Wednesday September 24, 2025 @01:57AM (#45356784)
I would go and say Fortran is pretty legible because it only has a handful of builtin keywords and none of the fancy stuff alot of other languages have.

Julia has the fancy stuff aswell as being very legible and also having a nice REPL for instant feedback which is usefull for people learning (as well as multiple notebook implementations Pluto.jl or Jupyter) Chapel has even more of the fancy stuff like multiple loop types for different kinds of parallelism which is just wildly cool.

[ Parent | on HN ]