50 years of Fortran at CERN (2007)

Re:50 years of Fortran at CERN (2007) by ced on Saturday July 18, 2015 @11:54AM (#9907836)

Yes, but from their perspective, it's an implementation detail. LAPACK could have been written in assembly language or APL, and their Python code would work just as well.

Python/Matlab/IDL are important because it is easier to quickly write correct code than in C++/Fortran.

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Re:50 years of Fortran at CERN (2007) by dekhn on Saturday July 18, 2015 @12:55PM (#9908047)

Right, but if you say people "use" something, it's disingenous (for a scientific paper) to imply that implementation details don't matter.

Had I written the paper (I'm a scientist, I work with astro data sets at times, and manage Python wrappers for Fortran and C++ libraries) I would have calculated this based on instructions executed, not lines of user-facing code.

After all, if the code the astro people called was Pure Python, they wouldn't use python, as it would be too slow.

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Re:50 years of Fortran at CERN (2007) by agumonkey on Saturday July 18, 2015 @04:54PM (#9908882)

Reminds me of the 'made in X' fallacy.

  #!/usr/bin/env python
  from subprocess import Popen
  Popen("/usr/bin/some-fortran-binary")
  print("Once again python saves the day.")

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Re:50 years of Fortran at CERN (2007) by math_and_stuff on Sunday July 19, 2015 @12:33AM (#9910056)

Actually, many optimized BLAS/LAPACK implementations are not written in Fortran. Many are a mix of C and assembly exposed through the standard Fortran interface.

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