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How Not to Write FORTRAN in Any Language
gManZboy writes "In an article that's sure to p/o Fortran programmers, Donn Seeley has assembled a rant that posits there are characteristics of good coding that transcend all programming languages, except Fortran. Seriously though, his point is that early FORTRAN made coding ugly. Thus the joke 'Don't write FORTRAN' was applied to anyone with ugly code. Though Fortran has in recent years overcome its early challenges, the point -- 'Don't write FORTRAN' (i.e. ugly stuff) -- still applies."
While I take issue with his blantant anti-FORTRANism, he makes the excellent point: Write good code in whatever language you write. Just because you can write Perl that looks like line noise does not meen you must.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
The name "FORTRAN" came from "FORmula TRANslator." It was created so that engineers and scientists could write programs to perform calculations. They wouldn't need a degree in programming, and they wouldn't be reliant on programming staff. They would be able to independently take advantage of a company's (or university's) computing resources. It wasn't DESIGNED to be a pretty language; it was designed to be used by people who would have stared blankly at you if you'd mentioned the concept of a pretty language. It served its purpose well.
It reminds me of SQL in that respect. I have worked with managers who knew less about computers than their secretaries, but they were able to use SQL to write queries to get information that they wanted. SQL was written for that purpose. It ain't pretty, but it serves its target market.
I doubt that designers of armored cars and dump trucks worry about the slings and arrows of the Ferrari's designers; I think this rant is pretty much in the same vein as that. Beauty and utility are not synonymous.
if the article weren't broken
into such small pieces.
That way I could
print it for my students.
Sort of amusing for an article that discusses using white space in a good way.
As Nietsche famously said, "If you stare too long into the Abyss, 1d4 Tanar'ri of random type will attack you."
I have to say my interest in the article plunged through the floor when I saw the example using Bush/WMDs as the subject. I immediately realized I'm either reading something written by a college student or someone who has not matured much beyond that. How gauche.
Regardless of how you feel about the politics, it's just not kosher to use examples like that. Clearly this is a person with an axe to grind.
I read the fucking article. I didn't see too much very insightful, or see any specific reference to Fortran at all.
Since major companies like IBM have chosen to produce compilers that perform best with FORTRAN. (absoft markets the compilers with a front end)
I like C, and a slew of other languages much better...
But my G5 dual-processor desktop machine can be optimized to run at around 35 GFLOPS. Try that on an 8086 derivative What, maybe you can get 2-4 GFLOPS per machine (if a dual-processor system)? I have a low-end supercomputer on my desk! Unfortunately, without FORTRAN, it wouldn't be so super.
FORTRAN is the only language that will easily take advantage of the HW (Altivec 'velocity engine' and parallel processing).
Each language is good for some tasks. FORTRAN happens to be good for performance in science and engineering work.
Fortran has been dieing longer than BSD has. People still write code in it, people still learn it as their first language, and there are millions of huge bug free programs that still need to be kept up to date. As many people have pointed out here, there are lots of virtues to Fortran 90 that make it worth using over other languages for certian applications. Fortran has made its way into the woodwork and it is here to stay!
Which is a shame really because you should be judging the quality of the application - and not what it was written in. Seriously, if it does x and it does it quickly and well with a nice user interface - does it really matter that it was written in Algol 68?
As a by no-means perfect example, check out this site which is, I think, a reasonably nice looking application written in Visual Basic (it acts as a GUI to the free SMS gateways out there). I don't claim to have it perfect, but the feedback I've had from people indicate that they don't think it's the usual run-of-the-mill-vb-application.
Disclaimer: I wrote it and the preference section is a little nasty, but I'm working on it. Also, I know that VB is only really for doing RAD but I don't have the time or inclination to learn Visual C++.
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The point of multidimensional arrays in FORTRAN is simple and straightforward: they're contiguous blocks of storage. In C, multidimensional arrays are a fiction, because a[i][j] is given exactly the semantics of *(*(a + i) + j), instead of *(a + i * second_dim + j). That extra dereference takes away a huge number of optimization opportunities.
Pointers are useful in systems programming, but K&R made C a much less useful scientific language by not including the multidimensional array dereference operator. That's fine -- they weren't writing a language for scientific computation. I even think they made the right design choice, since there was already one around; it was called "FORTRAN".