Fortran (Was: The "does Python have variables?" debate)

[Tomasz Rola]

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 07:09:27AM +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sun, 11 May 2014 01:17:55 -0500, Mark H Harris wrote:
> 
> > On 5/10/14 8:42 AM, Roy Smith wrote:
> >> Ars Technica article a couple of days ago, about Fortran, and what is
> >> likely to replace it:
> >>
> >> http://tinyurl.com/mr54p96
> >>
> >>
> > uhm, yeeah!
> > 
> > 'Julia' is going to give everyone a not so small run for competition;
> > justifiably so,  not just against FORTRAN.
> 
> That and two hundred other languages.
> 

Given that Fortran is here for almost 60 years and lot of effort has
been spent to keep it backwards compatible (AFAIK), I wouldn't hold my
breath. Something may look like cool and great, but wait ten years and
see if after major language revision you can still (more or less)
easily run your existing huge projects with it. Does it require to
give another option to compiler or does it require spending hours or
weeks deep in the code (possibly introducing subtle bugs, too)? So
far, in my opinion, very few languages can stand this test (or perhaps
none at all). Strong candidates are C, Fortran, Common Lisp, and
unfortunately, Java (I can only talk about those which I happened to use
and checked a bit, but not extensively). I'm not really sure about
Python, haven't had time/energy to check yet (but going 1.5->2.x was
painless to me).

> Good languages (for some definition of "good") are a dime a dozen. 
> Miranda, Rust, Go, D, Ceylon, Coffeescript, F#, Scala, Lua, Erlang, 
> Eiffel, Ocaml, Haskell, Kotlin, Grovy, Clojure, Dart, Mercury, ML... the 
> list of "amazing", "astounding" languages is never ending. Very few of 
> them take over the world, and those that do rarely do so due to technical 
> excellence. (BASIC, Java, PHP, Javascript ...)

... and Perl... Even if it's not as bad as I sometimes think. BTW,
after seeing "@" and "$" in Julia manual, I think I will stay aside
for a while.

> Some of them, like Haskell, influence other languages without ever
> being popular themselves.

Interestingly, Haskell developers seem to not care much about old
codebases in their own language (but I didn't make systematic research
of the subject). I hope others will not be influenced by such attitude
:-). Neglecting someone's effort to make working flawless code,
forcing people into periodic rewrites of things that used to work,
such events always blink red in my head.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **