(j3.2006) Fortran user interest survey

[Bill Long]

On Jul 8, 2016, at 12:55 PM, Damian Rouson <damian at sourceryinstitute.org> wrote:

> As I noted earlier, I detect a disconnect between user interests and what implementors report hearing from users. For example, several vendors say they have not heard interest in coarray Fortran (CAF). Yet OpenCoarrays releases have been downloaded a minimum of 936 times in the first year of release (http://bit.ly/29nkCez), not including repository clones and installations via package management, which would probably add several hundred more.  Also, survey data from 110 respondents over 8 training course sites shows 75% of respondents see learning CAF as somewhat or very important prior to attending the course (http://bit.ly/29nnjgm).  Anecdotally, short-course attendees found CAF of sufficient interest that they suggested moving the CAF material from the end to the beginning of the courses.   Similarly, although the graduate course I teach at Stanford is focused on object-oriented design, I revised it in the most recent offering to use CAF features from the first lecture onward and the students gave the course strong reviews. Somehow the user interest in at least this feature isn?t reaching vendors.


Well, coarrays are sort of like the iPhone.  You don?t realize you want it until someone invents it for you.   We?re just a lot worse at marketing than Apple. 

Cheers,
Bill


Bill Long                                                                       longb at cray.com
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