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."

Comments

Excellent points

[YankeeInExile]

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.

FORTRAN considered useful...like SQL

[dillon_rinker]

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.

Article format

[hobit]

It would be nice



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.

Was introducting Bush/WMDs really necessary?

[Saint Stephen]

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.

Re:Was introducting Bush/WMDs really necessary?

[FreeUser]

It even talks about leaving the UN. I don't see how it could offend anyone so much. Maybe next time the author will be more politcally correct in his examples.

I hope not. The world is ill with political correctness. We need to be able to talk about issues, in any manner we like, without fear of reprisal.

The new CorrectThink/PoliticalCorrectness coming from the right is even more frightening than that which came from the left ... not because of its contents (although one could make a strong argument for that: elevating the right's propensity for living in denial of Bush's machinations WRT Iraq to political correctness is far more sinister than elevating anti-sexism and anti-racism to the same level, though IMHO both are unhelpful), but because of its ever widening scope, touching every aspect of life, and every aspect of politics from micro-managed day-to-day minutia of Bush's latest behavior to general issues of philosophy and lifestyle, in ways the left thankfully never dreamed.

People on both the right and the left should be very politically incorrect, and if a few partisans on either side get offended, so much the better. We need straight, frank dialogue, and an ability to express opinion without fear of political, professional, and financial reprisal. That is, after all, what the founding father's meant by "freedom of speech," not the corporate muzzling we have today.

I can hear the right whining now: "We have freedom of speech, but freedom of speech has consiquences" (paraphrasing Baby Bush).

By that definition, Communist Russia had freedom of speech. You could say anything you like, but freedom of speech had consiquences ... like landing in Guantanamo ... oops, I mean the Gulag.

Really, the only expression that should be forbidden is one written in FORTRAN. *ducks!*

Why use FORTRAN these days?

[francisew]

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.

A bit like Visual Basic

[Mr_Silver]

I can liken this to Visual Basic. There are so many crappy visual basic applications out there designed by 14 year olds with no understanding of HCI and it's just got to a point where people go "vb? erk!" and avoid it completely.

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++.