[TUHS] Re: Nice video with Brian Kernighan

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Sun, Aug 21, 2022 at 11:11 AM John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:

> Nowadays, of course, awk is actually more readily available than Fortran.
>
> Becare of a statement/thinking like that.   While you and I might not
program with it, I can show you some interesting usage graphs.   Simply
over 90% of all supercomputer cycles are still Fortran (why - because the
Math has not changed - *a.k.a.* Cole's law).  Plus Fortran2018 is not the
language Rich and I learned in the 1960s and 1970s.  Also remember that
there are multiple extremely good commercial (production quality)
Fortran2018 implementations that are freely available for download for
everything from Windows to Linux to macOS [as I like to say - I don't
program in it, but FTN has paid my salary pretty much my mine entire 55+
years in the biz and make damned sure my OS and my systems run programs
compiled with it really well].  If you are interested, here is a pointer to
the Intel one: HPC Toolkit Download
<https://streaklinks.com/BK93i3_EhBDjUuXGPgr-7jLH/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.intel.com%2Fcontent%2Fwww%2Fus%2Fen%2Fdeveloper%2Ftools%2Foneapi%2Fhpc-toolkit-download.html>
which has the DNA from the old DEC compilers ground up and injected into
BTW [note you will need to download the free C/C++ compiler too which
contains the runtimes libraries that Fortran uses and shares].  While its
Fortran 2018, it will even compile 'dust decks Fortran-IV' - fixed format
too.   Programs like Adventure 'just work' (are actually part of the test
suite).    FWIW: I believe the Portland Group's compilers were/are also
freely available and maybe IBM's also but I have not tried to get them in a
few years.

BTW:  I have a young Mech E professor friend teaching/doing research @ an
infamous engineering school here in the Boston area.  He got his PhD about
5-6 years ago at another infamous school in the midwest.   What are all his
students using for their research? (which is thermal properties of
materials - trying to get the heat out our Si we can run them faster
without them melting). It is all Fortran, with a little bit of Numpy
(running on their Macs) to prep the data, but anything that matters runs on
the clusters in is Fortran.
ᐧ

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