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Sun Releases Fortran Replacement as OSS
sproketboy writes "Sun Microsystems has released an alpha version of a new programming language called Fortress to eventually replace Fortran for high performance scientific computing tasks. Fortress was designed specifically for multi-core processors and is published under the BSD license."
Much as I like Java, I'm not exactly sure how much a fortran-esqe language is going to "benefit from the lesson's learned with Java". It's apples to oranges, because of fortran's narrow focus, and equally narrow deployment base. Java's primary schtick is in the exact opposite direction, with wide focus, and deployment on a large number of systems.
I suppose increased multi-processor support would be nice. It'll all depend on performance.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Yep, programming languages advance by evolution, not intelligent design.
http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/PLDITutorial Slides9Jun2006.pdf
Fortress uses a lot of unicode mathematical operators, which slashdot will quite pitifully fail to display.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
For those who won't bother to read the article, Fortress was designed by Guy Steele, which gives it a good pedigree in my book. I heard his talk at OOPSLA 2006 on the language design decisions they made for Fortress, and although my Fortran (and math) experience is too shallow to fully appreciate it, I found it fascinating nonetheless.
At the very least, Sun has given people something to think about.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
I wrote a Fortran program that printed out a calendar with the year in a banner font at the top. It took 57 cards (no library calls etc, beyound PRINT). Try do anything useful in 57 lines with today's languages.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So they're going to include, what, a LaTeX implementation so programmers can make their symbols look right?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I've seen this a couple of days before and bothered to skim through the specifications carefully hidden in the depths of Sun's site. I am not pleased with what I saw. Summarizing:
It seems that the only Fortran-esque side of Fortress is that it is aimed at scientific computing and number-crunching. Other than that, the programming paradigm of Fortress is based on object orientation and programming-by-contract. If Java smelled like Smalltalk, Fortress smells like Eiffel.
Fortress has focus on three basic things:
1) programming by contract (pre-conditions and post-conditions of a method)
2) Numerical and dimensional correctness
3) Keeping the programming language as close to mathematical notation as possible.
1) means that people will write more to achieve the same thing with some guarantee of correctness. Much like Java's enforcement of exception handling, an be easily misused.
2) means that Sun bothered to include kelvin, Pascal, meter, second, Newton and every Physical unit you can think of as language keywords, that all parameters should specify what unit they're in, and that the language will do some effort to prevent errors arising from adding oranges and bananas, or precision errors from summing milligrams to some hundreds of kilograms.
3) means that Fortress will make Perl look readable. Good part of the language specification deals on how the editor should render the source code onscreen. The logical AND operator is the upward-pointing wedge symbol of math. The logical OR operator is the downward-poiting wedge symbol. The Integer type is that special-font Z, and a real is that special-font R. The specification deals on how to represent these in an ASCII file, using a meta-language similar to TeX (but incompatible with).
Programming Fortress on anything other than Sun's own IDE will most likely be unfeasible. Think of every math operator you've seen. If you have experience with TeX/LaTeX, think of those 4 pages from symbols.dvi with all symbols you could use. Those are the Fortress operators. Sun has finally come with something mor unreadable and with more operators than Perl. And the operators aren't even ASCII, they're untypeable. The bitwise AND and OR operators are a weird thing I had never seen before (after 5 years of engineering, and 5 years as graduate student in CompSci).
That said, Fortress may even succeed as a niche programming language. But I still have two concerns left:
How will non-scientific code look on it ? Surely Fortress programs will want to open windows, and dialog boxes, access files and the network. The math-oriented syntax has all it takes to make UI programming uglier than C+Xlib.
Sun claims that Fortress is aimed at High Performance Computing. Sun released an alpha interpreter of Fortress, which is written in Java. What kind of sick language designer writes an interpreter in Java to demonstrate something related to High Performance computing ?
In Fortress the basic types ZZ and RR provide arbitrary preceision integers and floats. If you want a specfied precision then you need, say, ZZ32 or RR64 etc. So in fact it is the correct notation.
Yes, but it is well documented and, if you are at all familiar with mathematics, straightforward to learn (indeed, you almost don't need to learn - instinctually typing in whatever you would say works for most symbols. It is no harder to learn than TeX - easier if you already know TeX in fact.
Sure, it applies to many people. None of them are in the target market for Fortess though. Fortress is aimed at mathematicians and scientists - the sort of people who are still using Fortran - and for them the math notation makes the whole thing much, much easier to read. It all depends on what you're used to. If you're a programmer who reads C and Java all day then that probably looks good to you. If you spend much of your time reading math papers, however, then mathematical syntax looks far more natural the the elaborate and obfuscated look of C. Congratulations, you're not the target market for the language - that doesn't mean it isn't a great idea that will be of great value to many other people.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
...and is published under the BSD license.
-...You keep using that license. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
But when I was postgrad at university, I helped a Math mate recode some department apps used in his thesis from Fortran into 'C'.
The end result is the damn stuff ran faster. I looked into it more deeply to try to understand the difference - was it that I (comp-sci major) was coding the apps more cleanly than the original math majors?
Details are lost - it was a while ago - but I do recall that the 'C' libs were doing most floating point operations faster than fortran. Not just the low level co-processor stuff, but also the more complex operations.
Surprised the heck out of both of us. I suspected at the time that it was just the variant of fortran we were running on Vax's, but didn't bother checking further.