[J3] [EXTERNAL] [BULK] Re: Niklaus Wirth

Mon Jan 8 13:54:31 UTC 2024

I’m just on this list as an observer, but I’ll toss out that my late husband had some opinions on what happened to Fortran, at least within his community (computational astrophysics).  One was the delayed addition of dynamic memory allocation, and when it finally appeared it was mostly through the rather clunky POINTER (which does still have uses) when ALLOCATABLE handled most of what that type of programmer wanted.  There had been kludges like “Cray/DEC pointers” but they weren’t standard. Another, at least in academia, was the lack of a free compiler for Fortran 90 for quite a while.  He was involved with colleagues in developing a code that is now pretty widely used in his subfield; it started in Fortran but a colleague switched to C because gcc was free and he could develop on his laptop.  I saw that early code and it was a good example of the old joke “real programmers can write Fortran in any language” since it had statements like #define REAL float; (so they could switch to double) and it had one gigantic header that basically functioned like a COMMON.  It has since been updated to C++ which I hope is better than the typical scientist-written C++.

I think pressure from the national labs (in the US) has also been a significant factor, since they hire CS graduates to do the programming “correctly.”  Those programmers just want to use C++ because reasons.  We have quite a few computational chemists at my university and we usually build their codes for them and most are still in Fortran, but I’m aware of some that are starting to migrate.

Somebody mentioned Python and I’m rather surprised that Python programmers would particularly dislike Fortran, aside from the fact that in my experience students used to interpreted languages hate all compiled languages.  They have a lot in common, e.g. Python: No semicolons or curly braces. Uses the words “and”, “or” and “not” (but no periods).  Oriented around modules at least as much as classes (and Python does not distinguish a class from a struct).  If one includes NumPy, which pretty much all numerically-oriented Python does, NumPy arrays and intrinsics are very similar to Fortran arrays.  The biggest difference is that Python is 0-based and row-major oriented.

Katherine Holcomb
UVA Research Computing  https://www.rc.virginia.edu
kah3f at virginia.edu<mailto:kah3f at virginia.edu>    434-982-5948
From: J3 <j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org> On Behalf Of Clune, Thomas L. (GSFC-6101) via J3
Sent: Monday, January 8, 2024 8:03 AM
To: General J3 interest list <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>; 'David Muxworthy' <d.muxworthy at bcs.org.uk>
Cc: Clune, Thomas L. (GSFC-6101) <thomas.l.clune at nasa.gov>
Subject: Re: [J3] [EXTERNAL] [BULK] Re: Niklaus Wirth

From my (admittedly rather limited) experience, anti-Fortran prejudice was quite pronounced in the mid-eighties when I was attending college.     Possibly even justified during that era.    My sense is that computer science profs never really adapted after that.  They all “knew” what Fortran (FORTRAN) was/is, and there were no real forces to revise such opinions.  And they then used FORTRAN as the punching bag when teaching subsequent generations.  Even at its best, Fortran was not really ever a language that would appeal in that profession where shiny/different has a higher priority.

Even in science departments there is pronounced ignorance about modern Fortran.  My daughter just completed her PhD in computational chemistry at UC Berkeley.    Profs there were dismissive when she pointed out that Fortran had OO and such.   She was simply wrong.   (Could be some misogyny mixing in with this of course.)

Cheers,

  *   Tom

From: J3 <j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org<mailto:j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org>> on behalf of j3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org<mailto:j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>>
Reply-To: j3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org<mailto:j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>>
Date: Saturday, January 6, 2024 at 9:45 AM
To: 'David Muxworthy' <d.muxworthy at bcs.org.uk<mailto:d.muxworthy at bcs.org.uk>>
Cc: "ian.chivers at chiversandbryan.co.uk<mailto:ian.chivers at chiversandbryan.co.uk>" <ian.chivers at chiversandbryan.co.uk<mailto:ian.chivers at chiversandbryan.co.uk>>, j3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org<mailto:j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [BULK] Re: [J3] Niklaus Wirth

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Hi David

I'm surprised given the dates
you mention of the late 90's
of the sarcastic comments.

The 90 and 95 standards had made
significant improvements to Fortran.

I have quite a lot of respect for Wirth
for the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon languages.

I also thought that the work they (ETH)
did with the Lilith was pretty good.

https://gcc02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FLilith_%2528computer%2529&data=05%7C02%7Cthomas.l.clune%40nasa.gov%7C420a667574994227bf6408dc0ec61249%7C7005d45845be48ae8140d43da96dd17b%7C0%7C0%7C638401491093668539%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=m6oclPw6mgHh5ftRQd45UefR3ecNsu6HxNafRPRwKKo%3D&reserved=0<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_%28computer%29>

Sadly when teaching Fortran there is
quite a lot of ignorance of modern Fortran.

On some of the recent courses I've given
people with a Python background tend to be
quite critical, especially
when this is the only language they know.

Ian Chivers

-----Original Message-----
From: David Muxworthy <d.t.muxworthy at btinternet.com<mailto:d.t.muxworthy at btinternet.com>>
Sent: Saturday, January 6, 2024 11:39 AM
To: Ian Chivers <ian.chivers at chiversandbryan.co.uk<mailto:ian.chivers at chiversandbryan.co.uk>>
Cc: General J3 interest list <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org<mailto:j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>>
Subject: Re: [J3] Niklaus Wirth

The first question is for David what was the date Of the talk?

1998 or 1999 so far as I remember.

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