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/
Of their mooted replacement languages, only Julia seems plausible at this point. It has the advantage that it can be presented as a notebook via Jupyter (https://jupyter.org/), since it seems many people prefer something interactive. (It was also clearly defined for the Fortran market; which other languages have the default index for the first element of an array as 1?)
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.
FORTRAN was my primary programming language starting in the mid-1970s, but it seemed to disappear from the face of the earth sometime in the late 1980s. These days, I never - literally never - see any mention of FORTRAN (now called Fortran) in the mainstream computing publications and websites. People don't even bother to poke fun at it, as they might occasionally at COBOL.
I'm somewhat mystified regarding - in my perception - Fortran's rapid descent into obscurity. I personally place the blame on the lengthy process of drawing up the Fortran 9x standard. By the time it was ratified, other languages had moved well past Fortran. Too bad.
Aside from when I explicitly Google for Fortran, the only other time I've heard Fortran mentioned in the last couple of decades has been when I ran into a high-energy physicist about a year ago. I asked whether anyone at her accelerator lab still used Fortran, and she said yes. So it looks as if I haven't been running in the right circles to encounter mentions of Fortran.
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 :-)
I know I am late to this conversation, but I have a question. In 1977 (yes that is not a typo) I was a graduate student at University of London and wrote a Fortran programme to perform a theoretical analysis on a practical materials problem. In recent years publications are comparing experimental data to theory but the theories are not as good as the one I worked on (not my theory, I just did the work to make it useable). I want to be able to offer the materials science community the ability to use my work for comparative purposes. Thus I looked into my PhD thesis and found a barely readable print out of the Fortran code. I could probably figure out what it all is. The two questions are, would this code work with a modern Fortran compiler and the original code calls on two libraries Calcomp and either NACE or more likely NAGF, are these still available? Maybe it would be simpler to get this stuff recoded, if only I could remember what it all means.
By the way a very informative and entertaining article, thanks Jim.
In the 1970s I wrote a FORTRAN compiler for the CDC 7600 at Manchester University as part of my PhD work investigating optimization for pipelined architectures. To understand a line of FORTRAN now, I'd have to get Jeff Rohl's old FORTRAN book out!
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/
Of their mooted replacement languages, only Julia seems plausible at this point. It has the advantage that it can be presented as a notebook via Jupyter (https://jupyter.org/), since it seems many people prefer something interactive. (It was also clearly defined for the Fortran market; which other languages have the default index for the first element of an array as 1?)
We can discuss over beer this evening :-)
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.
FORTRAN was my primary programming language starting in the mid-1970s, but it seemed to disappear from the face of the earth sometime in the late 1980s. These days, I never - literally never - see any mention of FORTRAN (now called Fortran) in the mainstream computing publications and websites. People don't even bother to poke fun at it, as they might occasionally at COBOL.
I'm somewhat mystified regarding - in my perception - Fortran's rapid descent into obscurity. I personally place the blame on the lengthy process of drawing up the Fortran 9x standard. By the time it was ratified, other languages had moved well past Fortran. Too bad.
Aside from when I explicitly Google for Fortran, the only other time I've heard Fortran mentioned in the last couple of decades has been when I ran into a high-energy physicist about a year ago. I asked whether anyone at her accelerator lab still used Fortran, and she said yes. So it looks as if I haven't been running in the right circles to encounter mentions of Fortran.
Always love your write ups. Very informative and fun to read 😊👏
Thanks, glad they are useful (and amusing :-))
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 :-)
I know I am late to this conversation, but I have a question. In 1977 (yes that is not a typo) I was a graduate student at University of London and wrote a Fortran programme to perform a theoretical analysis on a practical materials problem. In recent years publications are comparing experimental data to theory but the theories are not as good as the one I worked on (not my theory, I just did the work to make it useable). I want to be able to offer the materials science community the ability to use my work for comparative purposes. Thus I looked into my PhD thesis and found a barely readable print out of the Fortran code. I could probably figure out what it all is. The two questions are, would this code work with a modern Fortran compiler and the original code calls on two libraries Calcomp and either NACE or more likely NAGF, are these still available? Maybe it would be simpler to get this stuff recoded, if only I could remember what it all means.
By the way a very informative and entertaining article, thanks Jim.
Glad to hear you enjoyed the article.
A little Googling found https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/f77_src/calcomp/calcomp.html for the Calcomp plotter library, and I'm fairly confident that the NAG libraries will remain compatible. You should ask the folks at NAG...
https://nag.com/
Good luck!
In the 1970s I wrote a FORTRAN compiler for the CDC 7600 at Manchester University as part of my PhD work investigating optimization for pipelined architectures. To understand a line of FORTRAN now, I'd have to get Jeff Rohl's old FORTRAN book out!