IBM would probably settle very quickly for an agreement by SCO not to challenge its rights to UNIX/LINUX in the future.
No.
IBM stands accused by SCO of breaching a contract between the two and divulging priviledged information or methods to others by contributing code to Linux.
IBM has as customers the governments of just about every country in the world that can afford to invest in IT. IBM provides solutions to hospitals, research centers, and buisnesses all who deal in sensitive or proprietary information. IBM can not have people going around saying that IBM broke a contract, especially by not treating sensitive data or methods correctly. IBM must, as a buisness priority, have SCOs claims declared completely baseless.
Which, cheerfully enough, means that IBM can't settle for anything less than the complete dismantling of SCOs claims, which will be quickly followed by the destruction of SCO by IBM's counter claims.
As always, Groklaw has some excellent commentary on this, including a link
to a fascinating Interview iwith Ransom Love inteview about the whole SCO fiasco.
The RH-supplied latest OpenSSH (3.5p1-11) doesn't seem to accept the "UsePam no" directive that was suggested as a workaround, so if you go ahead and add that line to your/etc/ssh/sshd_config and say "service sshd restart", SSH will complain about an invalid configuration option and refuse to start.
While this has implications for government acceptance of Linux, which is good, it turns out that
it wasn't all that significant when W2K achieved it, and means even less that a system running linux got EAL2. It's probably most interesting that it was an IBM system running SUSE system, not RedHat.
Who is this analyst anyway? Is she even qualified to make this kind of distinction?
I'm curious, in a gossipy sort of way, about whether she is the Laura Didio who,
as a NY-area news intern,
``assembled a group of psychic researchers''
to
investigate the Amityville murders `haunted house' in 1976?
She went to Fordham and worked at the Village Voice
at roughly that time, but I can't find any actual dates, and Lexis-Nexis doesn't have any of the articles she apparently wrote for the Minneapolis Star & Tribune or Village Voice because it was too long ago.
Uh, no. To do that you have to do one of two things:
1) Pull out of the Berne Convention
Right; musn't have that. Pulling out of the
ABM treaty, ignoring parts of the
Geneva convention, and gutting the verification parts of the
biological weapons convention, that's all fair game. But the Berne convention and its IP guarantees, now that's sacred.
Privacy is not liberty, nor is it a "civil liberty", although it might be a "civil right"
This is an excellent and correct point, but I'll quibble just a bit. Some degree of privacy is a prerequisite for some liberties. For instance, it's widely (including by the SCOTUS) held that both a freedom of speech and a freedom to read
require some protection of privacy to be meaningful. Privacy may not be a liberty in and of itself, but it is necessary for other liberties.
Give us a break; if he felt that strongly about the war, he could've said, "Thanks, but I'll wait till you guys leave Iraq before I'll accept your money."
So it's your opinion that money should buy silence? That anyone who accepts money from the governement is morally required to not criticize the government that funded them? Or is it your position that the government should only fund researchers who agree with the current administration?
I think just the opposite; unless you want all research to lose its independance, you should criticize even your patrons if that's how you feel. That comment might cost him similar money in the future; but he said what he believed anyway. That does show backbone and ethics.
For all I know, The rationalle might be that he's accepting this money exactly because it'll be $2M that is not going to develop bombs or other WMDs. That seems like a completely self-consistant moral position.
The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. The Lord's prayer has only 67. The story of creation in the Bible uses only 200 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 271 words. On the other hand, a recent Federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.
No, see, that's the thing. Insane copyright monopoly extension, protection of convicted monopolists from punishment, big government subsidies for buisnesses, import taxes on steel --- these things aren't pro-market. Not in the short term, and certainly not in the long term. They are completely anti-market.
Lots of people who think they're conservatives routinely confuse policies that bail out current large buisnesses with being pro-market. They are very different things.
Software should be treated like other products
on
California EULA Lawsuit
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So, in trying to help a lady with a new computer, it turned out that the machine (which she bought from some compusa/bestbuy type of place) had a broken harddrive. She was a complete neophyte to computers, but when nothing happened when she turned on the machine except the wail of a thousand metallic banshees, she pretty much put two and two together and took the machine back and made them fix it.
This same new-to-computers-lady bought a computer game for her kid, and it didn't work on her computer. Oh, well, she shrugged. That happens.
She's right, of course, and it infuriates me that even a complete newbie to computers believes this -- broken hardware is covered by standard consumer-protection stuff, but if you buy broken software, you're out of luck.
And that brings me to this lawsuit.
Of course software is going
to suck if consumers aren't allowed to return
software, or even post reviews about it! In what other sort of consumer product would this sort of thing be even remotely acceptable? ``I'm sorry, sir, but yes, your riding lawnmower will occasionally experience `explosive events'. No, we won't take it back, and by the way, the Buisness Lawnmower Alliance will come and `audit' you if you consider writing a poor review of our product.''
A neccessary step to the wider distribution of non-abysmal commercial software is some minimal negative feedback to companies who write bad code. A perfectly reasonable step in that direction is just allowing people to return broken software.
Who says it has to work with other companies browsers?
I think you're misrepresenting what people are saying. No one's saying it has
to; I haven't read anyone suggesting that we
send the police to Redmond and lock the webmaster up because the website doesn't work with Opera. However,
It is going against the whole idea of the web for the site to work only with one browser, and
it's almost certainly yet another extremely sleazy buisness practice by MS.
Frankly, given the state of the web, it's the latter which is most notable. And it's the pettiness of the whole thing which is striking.
Going through the user agent string and using another CSS *just* to make it look bad? That's pretty childish. Do you really want your mission critical software written by such juvenile pranksters?
90% of bankruptcies, for instance, are due to medical bills, job loss, or divorce.
See, for instance, this link By and large, people with serious credit problems are not somehow morally weak, they are people who had really shitty runs of luck. (For instance, 68% of people filing for bankruptcy in 2001 had just had a job loss, and 50% had just had a serious medical problem in the family -- eg, there were a lot of people in 2001 who filed for bankruptcy because they had just been hit by *two* major events.)
No; most of the patents would have expired by now anway. The article seems to imply that the IP they're concerned about is definately copyrights:
"We've been looking at this for months. Every time we turn over a stone, there's something there," McBride said. "If you pull down (Mac) OS X you'll see a lot of copyright postings that point back to Unix Systems Laboratories, which is what we hold."
However, once the design for a piece of software is complete, one has created the software.
Right. So if only -- if only! -- there were some
way of designing software without actually writing the code. Some sort of planning process, maybe involving thinking and writing but not necessarily typing. Maybe you could make something that was the same type of thing, but only a beggining of it -- some sort of proto-type. Hmmm.
You could even try planning out the logic that would be necessarily before actually coding it.
Nah, I guess you're right, there is no design process for software other than coding.
The company that now owns the name Cray does
something very much like this on a fairly grand scale on its own architecture, the MTA (Multi-Threaded Architecture). Here, each processor switches between 128(!) hardware threads
to take advantage of the sort of concurrancy you can get for waiting for memory access, etc.
The GRE -- or a standardized test in general -- is a useful tool. It gives you a few very broad results for lots of people in a way that's known to be uniformly assessed, at the expense of a certain arbitrariness.
With personal interviews, you get a lot more discretion in the interviewing, and you can get a lot more depth of information, so things are a little less arbitrary -- but then you get the biases of the interviewers; someone who one interviewer might think is brilliant, another might dismiss as a hack. So you get deeper, more nuanced information, but less uniform and differently arbitrary.
Don't forget that in the US, most students coming into Ph.D. programs are coming straight out of undergraduate, so there is a real question of making sure everyone has the same background, and the students aren't launched immediately into research the way they might be in a system where you do a Master's first. Also, in a field like CS, you have people coming in from Math, CS, Physics, or Engineering background, so a `level laying field'-test is a useful tool.
The GRE provides four numbers -- a score on a subject test, and scores on three general tests -- logic problems, basic mathematics, and english skills. All of those can be useful pieces of information -- a bright person who can't read or write is unlikely to be a good TA or, for that matter, work well in groups where reports need to be written often. A person who knows tonnes about their subject but can't solve simple logic problems is unlikely to be a really creative researcher, etc.
When you have 500 people applying to your department, and you can only accept 20 or so students, you need a quick way of pruning the list to 50-100 or so, who you can then start looking at in more detail. For that, you need a broad, uniform measure, which is exactly what the GRE provides.
I don't know any department that bases its acceptances solely on the basis of the highest GRE scores, and those who did probably deserve the students they get. (A
Yale and Cornell study found that GRE scores corellated well with the students coursework grades, but poorly with overall sucess as a grad student). But it is a useful piece of information, and helps sorting through huge pools of applicants. Like any standardized test, the problems come when people take the tests too seriously, usually by assuming that the tests measure something that the test doesn't even claim to test for.
If I register floobydust.com, and I fill in a contact email that becomes invalid three days after I go live, is that Verisign's fault?
Right, except that according to the article:
One customer who registered a domain name using the fictitious name of "Toto" with the fake address of "Yellow Brick Road" in "Oz, Kansas." [...]
ICANN said VeriSign's violations include ignoring repeated requests to correct customer information for Dundjerski.com, in which the administrative contact was, "OOO Blank St., No City, XX 0000" with a phone number of "123-123-1234."
which is a little bit more obvious than an email address change.
If your code requires massive documentation within the code to make it understandable, then your code likely needs to be rewritten. [...stupid example deleted...]
I work on an academic simulation code. It's 300KLOC; small by commercial standards, sizable by academic standards.
It might be (but isn't) true that each and every line of the code is self-documenting; that at every line, it's clear what's happening.
But you know what?
There's three hundred fscking *thousand* of them! Sure, it might be clear that two lines do a matrix multiplication, but *why* is it doing it, and what are the implications for the remaing 299,998 lines of code?
Hell, without documentation running through the entire code, and probably alongside in manuals, how would you even know how to look at those particular 2 lines of code - constituting 0.0007% of the total code base?
Anyone who thinks that clear code doesn't need to be documented has never written a program more than a few hundred lines long.
I'm baffled by what the enforcement mechanism would be for the license. If you broke the license `agreement', so what?
The case for software licences is lame, but well set-out. The argument is that by making a copy of the software to have it run on your computer, you're making a copy of the whole piece of software, beyond fair-use rights. So you're breaking copyright law if you install or run the software. The license agreement allows you to install or run the software, so if you don't abide by the license agreement, you're in violation of copyright law and Bad Things can be done to you.
That argument is clearly bogus, but that's the state of Copyright case law at the moement.
But what could you possibly be in violation of if you shred the license on a book? For the license to be valid, it has to be giving *you* something as part of the deal. (IANAL, etc.) What could the book license possibly grant you that you can't get just by owning the book? The right to read it? No. You get to keep the book? No -- I either bought it, or in this case it arrived free; I own it, tough. So how could a book shrinkwrap possibly be valid?
Now, the DMCA puts some enforcable provisions in if its an e-book (hiss, spit). And signing an agreement before being given a book -- NDAs, or something -- that's a different story entirely. But I am having trouble imagining what legal leg these book-wrap licenses could possibly be standing on.
This may very well be taken as Flamebait or Offtopic, but I can't resist sticking my nose in here.
Public Libraries are _public_ places, owned by the _government_.
While this is often true, so what? The rest areas in national parks are also owned by the government, but that doesn't mean they have the right to put webcams in the latrines.
Further, it isn't always true. Lots of private universities have libraries; there are a number of privately-owned museums with libraries attatched.
Finally, while it is true your bog-standard municipal library is owned by `the government', it isn't owned by the federal government; it's generally a service of the municipal government, paid for by municpal ratepayers. Why exactly, again, does the FBI have the right to get any information at all from the library just because both the FBI and the municipal library are owned by `the' government?
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank and about as right-wing an organization as you can imagine,
a group I seldom have occasion to agree with, published a report
on these sorts of issues entitled ``Preserving our Liberties While Fighting Terrorism'', which, in discussing exactly the sort of new powers like being able to search library records with no probable cause, says:
That ought to give
pause to people of goodwill from all across the
political spectrum-since those are the telltale
signs of societies that are unfree.
I don't think there is anything in the above post which is correct.
The poster says:
I believe that the GNU and at least a few commercial fortran compilers translate the code to C before it compiles.
This isn't true, and I don't think has ever been true. Below is a quote from a g77 page:
The g77 compiler is a combination of a front end that translates Fortran source programs and a back end that uses the results of the translation to make an object or executable file that performs the actions specified by the source programs when run. The back end is the same back end used by GNU C, C++, and Objective-C, which have their own front ends to translate their respective languages. Other front ends for Pascal and ADA are available or in progress.
(Note: g77 does not translate Fortran to C code at any point. It is a native portable compiler, just like gcc. They share the same back end.)
No commercial compiler I'm aware of does anything similar, either. Obviously, one should be wary of taking language advice from someone who is this ill-informed about compilers.
As for unrelated bugs, this can be an issue. If all one wants to do is a fourier transform, or a singular-value decomposition, or something similar, on some data, it's clearly ridiculous to have to learn the C++ STL, or similar libraries in other languages, to just mess with some matricies. FORTRAN, for all its
problems, Will Just Work as long as you're doing something simple.
On the other hand, if you're just doing some small stuff and you don't want to deal with more complicated languages, the best bet is probably to use Matlab/IDL/Maple/Mathematica and not worry about computer programming at all. Even if you're planning on doing big calculations at this point, prototyping your algorithm and methods in these interpreted special-purpose tools can be a very good way to get your code up and running.
FORTRAN is an extremely simple language; because of this, optimizers can go nuts, writing extremely tight code. If you're trying to do lots of intense number crunching, and performance is an issue, it really is the right way to go. FORTRAN 90 has some support for modular programming and gets rid of a lot of silly syntactic things which have been mentioned elsewhere (6-char variablenames, strict line formatting, etc.). That's why even
Freshmeat has 29 FORTRAN-related projects.
Having said that, when you're writing a large piece of code, much of the code probably isn't number crunching; its schlepping data back and forth between solvers, doing I/O, etc. For that, FORTRAN is fairly limited; so you use other languages.
You use the right tool for the part of the code you're writing. We are working on a large simulation code; our numerical solvers are all in FORTRAN, and we have no intention of chaning that; however, we use other things (C, Python) for higher-level tasks. And this is how it should be. People who argue about `Language X rocks!' or `Language Y sucks!' Just Dont Get It. All the languages still in use are still in use for a reason -- they have certain things they're good at. And so you pick the right tool for the job.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
IBM stands accused by SCO of breaching a contract between the two and divulging priviledged information or methods to others by contributing code to Linux.
IBM has as customers the governments of just about every country in the world that can afford to invest in IT. IBM provides solutions to hospitals, research centers, and buisnesses all who deal in sensitive or proprietary information. IBM can not have people going around saying that IBM broke a contract, especially by not treating sensitive data or methods correctly. IBM must, as a buisness priority, have SCOs claims declared completely baseless.
Which, cheerfully enough, means that IBM can't settle for anything less than the complete dismantling of SCOs claims, which will be quickly followed by the destruction of SCO by IBM's counter claims.
As always, Groklaw has some excellent commentary on this, including a link to a fascinating Interview iwith Ransom Love inteview about the whole SCO fiasco.
Grandma's going to be awful surprised when she's told she has to go geocaching to get those pictures of little Johnny.
And thus, an effective workaround.
While this has implications for government acceptance of Linux, which is good, it turns out that it wasn't all that significant when W2K achieved it, and means even less that a system running linux got EAL2. It's probably most interesting that it was an IBM system running SUSE system, not RedHat.
6 * 9 is integer arithmetic.
I'm curious, in a gossipy sort of way, about whether she is the Laura Didio who, as a NY-area news intern, ``assembled a group of psychic researchers'' to investigate the Amityville murders `haunted house' in 1976? She went to Fordham and worked at the Village Voice at roughly that time, but I can't find any actual dates, and Lexis-Nexis doesn't have any of the articles she apparently wrote for the Minneapolis Star & Tribune or Village Voice because it was too long ago.
Right; musn't have that. Pulling out of the ABM treaty, ignoring parts of the Geneva convention, and gutting the verification parts of the biological weapons convention, that's all fair game. But the Berne convention and its IP guarantees, now that's sacred.
This is an excellent and correct point, but I'll quibble just a bit. Some degree of privacy is a prerequisite for some liberties. For instance, it's widely (including by the SCOTUS) held that both a freedom of speech and a freedom to read require some protection of privacy to be meaningful. Privacy may not be a liberty in and of itself, but it is necessary for other liberties.
So it's your opinion that money should buy silence? That anyone who accepts money from the governement is morally required to not criticize the government that funded them? Or is it your position that the government should only fund researchers who agree with the current administration?
I think just the opposite; unless you want all research to lose its independance, you should criticize even your patrons if that's how you feel. That comment might cost him similar money in the future; but he said what he believed anyway. That does show backbone and ethics.
For all I know, The rationalle might be that he's accepting this money exactly because it'll be $2M that is not going to develop bombs or other WMDs. That seems like a completely self-consistant moral position.
Arg! Not this again. This is an urban legend.
No, see, that's the thing. Insane copyright monopoly extension, protection of convicted monopolists from punishment, big government subsidies for buisnesses, import taxes on steel --- these things aren't pro-market. Not in the short term, and certainly not in the long term. They are completely anti-market.
Lots of people who think they're conservatives routinely confuse policies that bail out current large buisnesses with being pro-market. They are very different things.
This same new-to-computers-lady bought a computer game for her kid, and it didn't work on her computer. Oh, well, she shrugged. That happens.
She's right, of course, and it infuriates me that even a complete newbie to computers believes this -- broken hardware is covered by standard consumer-protection stuff, but if you buy broken software, you're out of luck.
And that brings me to this lawsuit. Of course software is going to suck if consumers aren't allowed to return software, or even post reviews about it! In what other sort of consumer product would this sort of thing be even remotely acceptable? ``I'm sorry, sir, but yes, your riding lawnmower will occasionally experience `explosive events'. No, we won't take it back, and by the way, the Buisness Lawnmower Alliance will come and `audit' you if you consider writing a poor review of our product.''
A neccessary step to the wider distribution of non-abysmal commercial software is some minimal negative feedback to companies who write bad code. A perfectly reasonable step in that direction is just allowing people to return broken software.
I think you're misrepresenting what people are saying. No one's saying it has to; I haven't read anyone suggesting that we send the police to Redmond and lock the webmaster up because the website doesn't work with Opera. However,
Frankly, given the state of the web, it's the latter which is most notable. And it's the pettiness of the whole thing which is striking. Going through the user agent string and using another CSS *just* to make it look bad? That's pretty childish. Do you really want your mission critical software written by such juvenile pranksters?
Lucky you.
90% of bankruptcies, for instance, are due to medical bills, job loss, or divorce. See, for instance, this link By and large, people with serious credit problems are not somehow morally weak, they are people who had really shitty runs of luck. (For instance, 68% of people filing for bankruptcy in 2001 had just had a job loss, and 50% had just had a serious medical problem in the family -- eg, there were a lot of people in 2001 who filed for bankruptcy because they had just been hit by *two* major events.)
Right. So if only -- if only! -- there were some way of designing software without actually writing the code. Some sort of planning process, maybe involving thinking and writing but not necessarily typing. Maybe you could make something that was the same type of thing, but only a beggining of it -- some sort of proto-type. Hmmm.
You could even try planning out the logic that would be necessarily before actually coding it.
Nah, I guess you're right, there is no design process for software other than coding.
The company that now owns the name Cray does something very much like this on a fairly grand scale on its own architecture, the MTA (Multi-Threaded Architecture). Here, each processor switches between 128(!) hardware threads to take advantage of the sort of concurrancy you can get for waiting for memory access, etc.
With personal interviews, you get a lot more discretion in the interviewing, and you can get a lot more depth of information, so things are a little less arbitrary -- but then you get the biases of the interviewers; someone who one interviewer might think is brilliant, another might dismiss as a hack. So you get deeper, more nuanced information, but less uniform and differently arbitrary.
Don't forget that in the US, most students coming into Ph.D. programs are coming straight out of undergraduate, so there is a real question of making sure everyone has the same background, and the students aren't launched immediately into research the way they might be in a system where you do a Master's first. Also, in a field like CS, you have people coming in from Math, CS, Physics, or Engineering background, so a `level laying field'-test is a useful tool.
The GRE provides four numbers -- a score on a subject test, and scores on three general tests -- logic problems, basic mathematics, and english skills. All of those can be useful pieces of information -- a bright person who can't read or write is unlikely to be a good TA or, for that matter, work well in groups where reports need to be written often. A person who knows tonnes about their subject but can't solve simple logic problems is unlikely to be a really creative researcher, etc.
When you have 500 people applying to your department, and you can only accept 20 or so students, you need a quick way of pruning the list to 50-100 or so, who you can then start looking at in more detail. For that, you need a broad, uniform measure, which is exactly what the GRE provides.
I don't know any department that bases its acceptances solely on the basis of the highest GRE scores, and those who did probably deserve the students they get. (A Yale and Cornell study found that GRE scores corellated well with the students coursework grades, but poorly with overall sucess as a grad student). But it is a useful piece of information, and helps sorting through huge pools of applicants. Like any standardized test, the problems come when people take the tests too seriously, usually by assuming that the tests measure something that the test doesn't even claim to test for.
Right, except that according to the article:
which is a little bit more obvious than an email address change.I work on an academic simulation code. It's 300KLOC; small by commercial standards, sizable by academic standards.
It might be (but isn't) true that each and every line of the code is self-documenting; that at every line, it's clear what's happening.
But you know what?
There's three hundred fscking *thousand* of them! Sure, it might be clear that two lines do a matrix multiplication, but *why* is it doing it, and what are the implications for the remaing 299,998 lines of code?
Hell, without documentation running through the entire code, and probably alongside in manuals, how would you even know how to look at those particular 2 lines of code - constituting 0.0007% of the total code base?
Anyone who thinks that clear code doesn't need to be documented has never written a program more than a few hundred lines long.
The case for software licences is lame, but well set-out. The argument is that by making a copy of the software to have it run on your computer, you're making a copy of the whole piece of software, beyond fair-use rights. So you're breaking copyright law if you install or run the software. The license agreement allows you to install or run the software, so if you don't abide by the license agreement, you're in violation of copyright law and Bad Things can be done to you.
That argument is clearly bogus, but that's the state of Copyright case law at the moement.
But what could you possibly be in violation of if you shred the license on a book? For the license to be valid, it has to be giving *you* something as part of the deal. (IANAL, etc.) What could the book license possibly grant you that you can't get just by owning the book? The right to read it? No. You get to keep the book? No -- I either bought it, or in this case it arrived free; I own it, tough. So how could a book shrinkwrap possibly be valid?
Now, the DMCA puts some enforcable provisions in if its an e-book (hiss, spit). And signing an agreement before being given a book -- NDAs, or something -- that's a different story entirely. But I am having trouble imagining what legal leg these book-wrap licenses could possibly be standing on.
- While this is often true, so what? The rest areas in national parks are also owned by the government, but that doesn't mean they have the right to put webcams in the latrines.
-
Further, it isn't always true. Lots of private universities have libraries; there are a number of privately-owned museums with libraries attatched.
-
Finally, while it is true your bog-standard municipal library is owned by `the government', it isn't owned by the federal government; it's generally a service of the municipal government, paid for by municpal ratepayers. Why exactly, again, does the FBI have the right to get any information at all from the library just because both the FBI and the municipal library are owned by `the' government?
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank and about as right-wing an organization as you can imagine, a group I seldom have occasion to agree with, published a report on these sorts of issues entitled ``Preserving our Liberties While Fighting Terrorism'', which, in discussing exactly the sort of new powers like being able to search library records with no probable cause, says:The poster says:
This isn't true, and I don't think has ever been true. Below is a quote from a g77 page:
No commercial compiler I'm aware of does anything similar, either. Obviously, one should be wary of taking language advice from someone who is this ill-informed about compilers.
As for unrelated bugs, this can be an issue. If all one wants to do is a fourier transform, or a singular-value decomposition, or something similar, on some data, it's clearly ridiculous to have to learn the C++ STL, or similar libraries in other languages, to just mess with some matricies. FORTRAN, for all its problems, Will Just Work as long as you're doing something simple.
On the other hand, if you're just doing some small stuff and you don't want to deal with more complicated languages, the best bet is probably to use Matlab/IDL/Maple/Mathematica and not worry about computer programming at all. Even if you're planning on doing big calculations at this point, prototyping your algorithm and methods in these interpreted special-purpose tools can be a very good way to get your code up and running.
Having said that, when you're writing a large piece of code, much of the code probably isn't number crunching; its schlepping data back and forth between solvers, doing I/O, etc. For that, FORTRAN is fairly limited; so you use other languages.
You use the right tool for the part of the code you're writing. We are working on a large simulation code; our numerical solvers are all in FORTRAN, and we have no intention of chaning that; however, we use other things (C, Python) for higher-level tasks. And this is how it should be. People who argue about `Language X rocks!' or `Language Y sucks!' Just Dont Get It. All the languages still in use are still in use for a reason -- they have certain things they're good at. And so you pick the right tool for the job.