> And with excellent, state of the art libraries. What’s not to like?
Here's my gripe with Fortran: as a computer scientists that works with combustion chemists, astrophysicists, and nuclear physicists, it's disheartening to see the number of domain specific optimizations that these scientists hand code over and over and over ad nauseam in hundreds of code bases all around the world simply because they think their Fortran compilers are good enough. They don't realize that it would be much more productive if their communities standardized around individual DSL compilers capable of doing higher level transformations specific to their individual domains so they don't have to do complicated transformations by hand (and often mess them up). It's fine if those DSL compilers generate Fortran out the back end so they can interoperate with existing optimized Fortran libraries, but holy hell people, we are living in the 21st century, can we please stop programming in primitive data types (without any unit type checking to boot!) and calling MPI send/recv directly. Scientists have better things to be doing with their time than managing bits directly; raise the level of abstraction by building community specific DSLs, standardize, and let's get on with our lives.
Meanwhile, you can take the code from a paper of 20 years ago and it will run flawlessly, without going through dependency hell and battling compiler versions. Code reuse is not always a good thing; self-contained, zero-dependency code is often extremely important. I’ll stay with Fortran for my physics needs, thank you.
It's true that it could happen with any language, but it seems to be especially prevalent and widespread with Fortran. Something about the culture of the language encourages people to dig their heels in and assert that it is good enough.
Here's my gripe with Fortran: as a computer scientists that works with combustion chemists, astrophysicists, and nuclear physicists, it's disheartening to see the number of domain specific optimizations that these scientists hand code over and over and over ad nauseam in hundreds of code bases all around the world simply because they think their Fortran compilers are good enough. They don't realize that it would be much more productive if their communities standardized around individual DSL compilers capable of doing higher level transformations specific to their individual domains so they don't have to do complicated transformations by hand (and often mess them up). It's fine if those DSL compilers generate Fortran out the back end so they can interoperate with existing optimized Fortran libraries, but holy hell people, we are living in the 21st century, can we please stop programming in primitive data types (without any unit type checking to boot!) and calling MPI send/recv directly. Scientists have better things to be doing with their time than managing bits directly; raise the level of abstraction by building community specific DSLs, standardize, and let's get on with our lives.