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In the Beginning Was FORTRAN.
Faux_Pseudo writes: "The NY Times (free reg) has a nostalgic article on the birth of the language that made computers usable by people without an IQ over 300. You might also note the lack of focus groups looking over their shoulders telling them what it should be, bureaucrats telling them when it must be released and bean counters about how much they could spend doing it."
FORTRAN and an Office XP ad on the same page next to each other. Obsoletes back to back. ;-)
You'd be surprised how many people still use Fortran. Many Engineering programs still teach it as the primary languange, mostly because it fits their problems quite well. Also, Fortran has not been stagnant over the years, Fortran95 is actually a fairly modern language that loses most of the big limitations of earlier Fortrans (no recursion, thread-unsafe, column alignment, etc...)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Slacker!
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The first BASIC system, the one written by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth, was a compiler. It was felt (rightfully so) that this was needed in order to make the system fast enough to be usable. For whatever reason, this is often overlooked nowadays, and many people assume that BASIC compilers started with VB 5.
References:
A History of BASIC (Jones Telecommunication & Multimedia Encycolpedia)
BASIC (Wikipedia)
Re: Scripting vs. Programming language vs. 4GL? (comp.compilers article by David Wright)
Check out the G95 project at http://g95.sourceforge.net/. It's still in the beginning stages, but someone like you who knows the language could certainly help with the development. At worst, you could run your code through it and give feedback.
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Well of course my position is biased coming from the heavy duty side of hydrodynamic simulations of supernovae, collisions between galaxies, and large scale cosmological simulations.
;)
And we're not talking stuff that takes days, we're talking stuff that takes months
These are the sorts of things where you'd rather spend the extra time in development to tweak a few extra percent, rather than use a language/platform which introduces a significant amount of overhead.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Ha! Do you realize how many scientists still use fortran? They still teach it in my computational physics class (although half the time it's taught in c).
I'll be the first to admit that it sucks to program in, but it does have its advantages. Fortran compilers for large machines tend to be very well optimized, and can generate faster code than the equivalent c compilers. Also, the restrictions the language imposes makes it easier for the compiler to optimize the resulting binary.
And don't forget, freedom comes with a price. C's pointers are fun to use and allow for many interesting solutions to problems, but they are the number one cause of bugs in C.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
For fortune and for all time:
"We were the hackers of those days," said Richard Goldberg, now 77, one of the original Fortran team members.
Could it get any better than that?
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satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
"You simply had to make it easier for people to program."
And a giant step it was back then. We all owe the original Fortran team a debt of gratitude. However, I think that the programming world could afford another giant step because it is still not easy for people to program. It still takes years of training and experience and the process is expensive, time consuming and prone to errors.
We won't be there until the average human being can put a sophisticated application together after just a few hours on a computer. We need powerful compositional software tools that allow us to throw pre-packaged components together simply by clicking and dragging. Software components should have plug-compatible connectors that can connect together automatically. Building a primitive component should be just as easy. It should all be message (data) and/or signal driven. Until then, software is still a primitive cottage industry that just limps along the best it knows how. My apologies to all the pioneers on whose shoulders we stand.
It depends on the test. Mensa requires that you score 98th percentile or better on a standardized intelligence test. There are many different tests that they accept. Ten years ago when I took the tests, I know that included the Cattel Test and the California Test of Mental Maturity. I took both, and interestingly enough got the exact same percentile even though the tests are quite different. Many tests have different scales, so the number doesn't really count. 180 is quite high on some scales, such as this one where 131 will put you at the 98th percentile.
So, IQ is really just a number for braggarts to toss around, it's the percentile that counts, if that counts at all. I used to be in Mensa, but I never quite understood what they were all about. It was a little bit social club, a little bit of pimping for the idea of intelligence tests, and a lot of people with big egos. In some ways it was OK, but I'd rather hang out with intelligent people who aren't getting together just because they're intelligent, so I'll take a user group or some other fun gathering over a Mensa meeting any day.
But I suppose I'll get flamed now for trying to act cool by saying "I could be in Mensa, but I'm not". I just hope it's a good flame and not a boring goatse.cx link. 8-)
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
Damn. I just spent weeks coding a complicated algorithm in c++, all on the assumption that fortran sucked. Thanks for the tip you bastard, where were you last month? ;)
:wq
All the talk about FORTRAN made be remember a funny story. It happened before my time but there was a FORTRAN compiler on an old PDP that wasn't all that fuzzy. Once a really obscure bug showed up in a big (numerical simulation) program. All of a sudden the program started to act as it couldn't count anymore. Expressions such as x+y were evaluated to something it shouldn't have been... After quite some time the bug was found. It turned out that somewhere a function was called with a literal 3 as one of the arguments. Inside the function the corresponding variable was set to 4. After that the computer was acting as if 3==4!
....would still be in use 30 years later.
Just last week I integrated some Fortran code into a DLL that will wind up on several hundred desktops. It does regressions.
The regression code was written about 30 years ago. It still runs as good today as it did 30 years ago.
When was the last time you wrote something that will run exactly as you wrote it 30 years from now?
It would be nice to see Fortran moved into the CLRE framework MS is proposing to make cross language issues less tedious.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Computer programmers, before high level programming languages, were poorly paid and were not considered to be highly skilled valuable employees. No, one thought them to be geniuses
The computers of the time were mostly used to calculate scientific problems, the scientists were not the programmers.
BTW Fortran was not the first high level language, their were a few interpreted languages before it.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
300 was just a nice round exaggerated number.
The true requirement is that you place in the 98th percentile.
Fun with numbers:
pop. with IQ >125 = 3.5%
pop. with IQ 125 with Bipolar Disorder = 33%
Percent of Bipolar people that make up the 1% of total population with Bipolar = ~97%
The numbers for other disorders like schizophrenia are much the same.
Most people with an IQ in the 180 range that I have met are unable to see the value in things like bathing more than 1 time a week, can't tie there shoe laces, can't spell or lack some other less obvious skill like the ability to say how much time has passed (like 3 minutes or 3 hours).
Ignorance is bliss and Mensa is expensive.
Ascii artist &
A: I don't know, but they will call it Fortran.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
If you're writing the newest and best desktop, use C++, or Java, or something else well suited for the job. If you want to integrate complex fluid systems or model intricate mechanical systems, grab yourself a Fortran compiler and go to town.
One of my biggest complaints about Linux is that there isn't a modern open source Fortran compiler for it.
The middle mind speaks!
My university has two large SGI systems that crank away on compiled fortran code day and night. Our analog EE's, biowarfare research group, and meteorology folks keep both machines at about 95% load around the clock. One machine is a shiny new Origin 3000 (96x R14K/500) and the other is an Origin 2000 (64x R10K/250). The O2K has a stack of R14K/500 CPU nodeboards and an additional 64 GB ram ready to replace its aging R10Ks, but the users keep telling the admin staff to "wait another day, my big batch job is almost done".
f ortran.html a po.html m ips73features.html
The decision to switch from a Cray C90 to SGI had a lot to do with SGI's on-going fortran compiler development, optimization, and obscure/rare bug hunts. Their short term Cray R&D ownership also brought about some updated scientific libraries and optimized routines. Lots of happy folks here.
http://www.sgi.com/software/scsl.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/
One of my biggest complaints about Linux is that there isn't a modern open source Fortran compiler for it.
I'm sure you probably mean Linux for IA32/x86, but this may be of interest anyway... seems SGI is hard at work on a "commercial-grade" freeware set of compilers for Linux IA64/Itanium. Not only will their Pro64 compilers include F90/F95 support, but they will also be bringing over their SCSL libraries gained from Cray. Neat stuff.
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/Pro64/
This article made me think of a professor at our university...he's a walking piece of nostalgia himself. Our computer labs used to come well-stocked with SPSS v1 and Fortran manuals for people to sign out...of course no one ever did, except for this one prof who looks like he's straight out of the 70s.
A couple years ago we remodelled our labs and we tossed out all of the documentation produced before 1990, and of course he was appauled to find out that we no longer had the manuals he needed. The looks on the faces of the lab assistants (all born after 1977) when asked about Fortran syntax was priceless.
~~~ the problem as i see it is that i have absolutely no personality of my own.
For those of you who are really interested in the history of programming languages:
You have to go to a library, actually; the article is not available online. But it pays back with the wonderfull style of DEK.
Online addicts may want to check The historical development of Fortran.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Yes, Fortran...
;-). For EVERYTHING ELSE there are other, often better tools...Fortran for numerical processing, Perl for text processing, Java for portable applets and servlets, etc etc...
;-)
OK, I admit it...I know Fortran and I'm proud of it. I Learned F77 and F90 in University (it was part of the Electrical Engineering program). No, I am not a dinosaur from the punch card days, I'm only 25.
I know of NO BETTER LANGUAGE to handle complex algebra arithmetic or matrices. I had to use both Fortran, C and MATLAB at various times during my schooling for numerical methods and digitital signal processing courses, and I think Fortran is the best suited by far--it is much faster than MATLAB and it is more suited to the task than C. Sure C is flexible, but in being flexible it makes a LOT of useful tasks difficult to accomplish. Yeah yeah, there are C libraries out there for complex numbers and matrices, but are they standardised and widely known? I wasn't aware of any when I was in school...and Fortran IS widely known amongst scientists and engineers at least.
Yeah, Fortran is old, weird (for some) and inflexible, but it was designed to tackle mathematical computations for scientists and engineers (FORmula TRANslation...think why they called it that?). It wasn't meant to program OSes in, or hook to relation database, or process text, or be compiled on-the-fly and embedded on a web page, or do e-commerce. It is a number-crunching tool, and a VERY WORTHY one at that.
I see C and C++ as jacks of all trades, masters of none...they can do everything, but make everything difficult, which makes them good to use when you need to develop a jack-of-all-trades program or where speed and size are critical and you need more portability than assembly language (I think a really good use for C is to use it to write other languages
*sigh* Why do people get caught up in language wars? Every language has its merits in certain areas...yes, I'm sure even Cobol and BASIC have some merits...I just have to think for awhile and I'll find them
The story explicitly points out that the project was approved with a nod and never had a formal budget.
Don't get me wrong: I'm actually one of the people who believes that (good) managers are an asset to a company. But in this case, it really sounds like this thing was a skunkworks, something flying so far below the radar of management -- or at least management who might gripe about it -- that the environment had a much more academic flavor. That's the kind of thing that a company with IBM's muscle could afford to do at the time.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I had the opportunity to mess with fortran as a programming excersise in school. It was quite an eperience
More importantly than the content of this article (which is interesting but known by most techies), is the fact that the article appeared in the NY Times - a mainstream media outlet. Even five years ago, the apearance of such an article would be unheard of. It's amazing that information technology has become so pervasive in our sucture, beyond the stature of a tool - a means to an end; but rather all aspects of computer technologies now represent such a source of interest to the general public that the mainstream media feel it appropriate to cover such an arcaine (although interesting to us geeks) piece of computer history.
It's actually quite gratifying to see this level of interest in technological history by the general public (as represented by the fact that the article was published in such a mainstream paper)
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Set the Wayback machine, Sherman.
18 years ago I finished college and got my first programming gig at a manufacturing company. We wrote (almost) exclusively in Fortran on a Prime mini (anyone remember PrimOS?). Anyways, Fortran rocked back then for writing mathematically complex apps for shop-floor controls - scheduling for shipping and manufacturing runs, inventory analysis and projections, BOM component tracking and the like.
After 4 years of this I moved to a large bank where, inevitably, Cobol was king on the mainframe. I still work at this bank and, incredibly, my Fortran skills were called upon just 2 years ago (moving from Java back to Fortran was akin to the Enterprise slingshotting around the Sun to travel back in time!). We have a Cobol module (like a DLL for you young'uns) that calculates a type of interest using Log functions. Long story short, I wrote a Fortran module to get at Log libraries and statically linked it inside the Cobol module to provide a much faster calc routine.
Maybe Fortran is old, but amazingly it's still in use in lots of places.
P.S. For all you greenhorns out there clucking your tongue and predicting (hoping for?) the end of Fortran's cousine Cobol, please understand that there are still billions of lines of Cobol in the world being developed by thousands and thousands of programmers (more than there are Java programmers). Cobol is aimed at business apps, period. You know - Common Business Oriented Language? It's a tool for a specific kind of task, plain and simple. Unfortunately, too many people advocate a one-size-fits-all approach to software (when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail).
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
FORTRAN does fit pure number-crunching applications (science and engineering) fairly well. The syntax and (since 1977) program structure are a pretty good match to specifications written in math, and the compiled executables are _fast_. There are thousands of libraries for mathematical and statistical applications. Finally, it's easier to write a compiler that will automatically divide up the work among multiple CPU's in FORTRAN than in most procedural languages. (This is primarily due to a lack of those features that make C/C++ so flexible but also allow all sorts of non-obvious side effects.)
So if you are going to write programs that will tie up the FPU for hours, days, weeks, or even months, and don't need a user interface or care much what the printout looks like as long as the numbers are accurate, then FORTRAN is the right tool (assuming the job is too big for math worksheet tools like MATLAB). If you need a decent user interface, or have to produce nice looking reports for managers, then using FORTRAN is like building a car body with a hammer and anvil. I did have to do a short hardware-driver type of program in FORTRAN back in engineering school (it was the only compiler the obsolete minicomputer in that lab had), but if there'd been an _assembler_ available it would have been easier. I knew of companies that did all their programming in FORTRAN through the 60's and 70's, from corporate accounting to machine control programs, but it sure wasn't a smart choice.
Actually, it's funny. The majority of people I know who could qualify for mensa AREN'T in mensa at all. Big reason? Anyone with an IQ hovering around the 98th might find the organization something to boost themselves with (think self-esteem problems), but for the most part, once you get past that level, IQ tests (especially for adults) become less and less meaningful. Anyone who can score over 150 on DECENT tests (as opposed to 25 pages of 'a fox is like cheese as religion is like______') usually has no interest limiting their social group to only one type of person.
On a personal note, what finally convinced me that being a geek may be cool, but sometimes it can be taken to extremes, was going to my first mensa-related social gathering. No lie, these people were sitting around, sipping wine, nibbling cheese, listening to Opera on an incredibly expensive sound system, and discussing the legitimacy of Star Trek. I felt like I had walked into a stereotype. When I pointed this out to them, no one really seemed to understand what I found funny about the whole thing.
I guess having a higher than average IQ doesn't always make you 'smart' :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Even a 'IQ over 300' can't save you from the slashdot effect.
C THE ONLY TIME I USED FORTRAN WAS IN HIGH x
C SCHOOL IN ABOUT 1980 ON A PDP-8 WITH A x
100 FORMAT('PUNCH CARD READER. OUR CARD PUNCH') x
110 FORMAT('DIDNT WORK SO WE HAD TO MARK THE') x
120 FORMAT('TEDIOUS PENCIL-MARKED CARDS BY') x
130 FORMAT('HAND. OUR FORTRAN COMPILER WAS') x
140 FORMAT('BROKEN TOO, SO I WROTE A PROGRAM') x
C IN BASIC TO MIMIC THE OUTPUT OF A FORTRAN x
C RUN, INCLUDING JOB CONTROL MESSAGES. I WAS x
C ABOUT THE ONLY PERSON IN MY CLASS x
C TO GET CREDIT ON THE FORTRAN SECTION x
C OF THE COURSE.
C IT LOOKS LIKE SLASHDOT IS MESSING UP MY
C CARD COLUMN FORMAT HERE. THIS PROGRAM
C WON'T LOAD.
SYNTAX ERROR LINE 1 COLUMN 3
ABEND JOB 1343
THU JUN 14, 2001 5:23GMT LPT42X
RUNTIME: 342MS COMPUTING UNITS USED: 7
YOU HAVE 432 UNITS REMAINING IN YOUR ACCOUNT
My current place of employment still uses FORTRAN, and it's still a very integral part of the system.
The computer system is a real time host that processes up to 800 transactions per second. Each transaction consists of incoming data, validation, comparison to other data, writing of data to disk, formulation of reply, validation of reply and sending of reply. The central engines are written in FORTRAN.
We have a slightly nicer front end (pre-compiler) called RATFOR - it's much closer to C. The rest of the system is written in C, and there's some nice stuff done to interface between the FORTRAN and C code.
This system is supporting a very large business, and has to be stable. It also has to handle enormous amounts of transactions at peak periods. It has to do it reliably, and fast. FORTRAN is at the heart of this system, pumping away without problems. Don't think it's crap, just because it's old!
. . . teach his grandfather to shoot. What's necessary isn't to make programming easier, it's to raise programmers. To make automobile construction other than a cottage industry, we didn't make engineering easier, we raised engineers. Likewise software.
Education is the bottom line. If we want everyone to be able to program computers in at least a basic way, we need to introduce our children to them at an early age as something other than toys and media outlets. Programming will never be "easy" until compilers are as ubiquitous as web browsers, and as often used.
-- Robert Bunn, gun-toting neo-Nazi anarchist redneck freak