6 Comments
Sep 22, 2022Liked by Jim Cownie

Good points and interesting figures on the usage of Archer. You caused me to check up a vaguely remembered comment about the future of programming languages - it turns out to be from Tony Hoare (FRS and winner of the 1980 Turing Award) in 1982. He said I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.” It would be a stretch to claim that "The language of the year 2022 is Fortran" but it is certainly the case that what is called Fortran today is not the Fortran I learned in 1972. By the way, the article from 2014 which quoted Hoare makes interesting reading alongside yours - https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computings-future-can-any-coding-language-top-a-1950s-behemoth/

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Mar 24Liked by Jim Cownie

It was awhile ago, but the Texas Instruments supercomputers, 7 of which were built in the late 1970s were optimized for FORTRAN. To take advantage of that, everything possible including the Cobol compilers were written in FORTRAN.

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Sep 22, 2022Liked by Jim Cownie

Always love your write ups. Very informative and fun to read 😊👏

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Gilles Gouaillardet pointed out on Twitter that GROMACS is written in C++, not C. https://twitter.com/giIIes/status/1572964309092945920?s=20&t=PG7befscq2l5zvE34HNb9Q

Looking at their installation manual you need both C and C++17 compilers. I'll update the script to say it is C++, but that doesn't affect any of the conclusions about Fortran, merely changes the balance in any C vs C++ battle someone may choose to fight :-)

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