Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaaxyz | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the subtitle, there's a lot of bad and deprecated software in the medical industry. The comparison between climate modeling using Fortran and shiny IDEs with easy to use interfaces is completely wrong though. Climate modeling, like most compute intensive fields, uses Fortran because it's fast and that's what the software needs to be. It doesn't need a shiny interface because all its meant to do is take in a set of numbers and produce another set of numbers as efficiently as possible. There's is no need for a front-end or for user interactions.

It's like saying that a road bike is "bad" because it isn't as comfortable as your city bike. Different beasts for different needs.

View on HN

>Climate modeling, like most compute intensive fields, uses Fortran because it's fast and that's what the software needs to be.

Also because the laws of physics (and the math to do approximation) don't change very often. The older that Runge-Kutta function is in the codebase, the more chance it has to be part of the sample code that they test the compiler's optimizer/benchmark with too!

And Fortran is old enough it's possible to build wrappers around it, should the user really need a new interface.

> It doesn't need a shiny interface ...

Did you ask the users of the system or you just assume they don't want one?

Arguably 'the user' in this case is a highly parallelized multi-core server. :)

The author is looking at it from an 'everything is an App' world, without the domain knowledge of Meteorology or HPC calculations. Implying that a lack of 'user interference' equalls 'bad software' is a very uninformed claim.

Equally misplaced outrage with trying to compare VSCode, from a company with 143 billion in revenue, with (often decade old) EHR systems which are decided 'on a budget' by Heads of clinical departments (AND Purchasing/Finance) with little to no input from actual 'end users'.

The user is me, and you put a layer in between me and the mathematics that I need to verify when you prise the Fortran source from my cold dead hands :-).

Some of these fairly unknown systems that are "terrible" enterprisey make many billions of dollars in sales, VS Code makes nothing directly as it's free (MS gets good PR for publishing it, but it's extremely hard to put a number on how much it's worth for them). Implying that just because MS makes VSC and it makes 143 billion in revenue, it must be much better/nicer than EHR/ systems made by somewhat smaller companies (still, some pretty huge ones make shitty software, like SAP with over 50-billion income) whose whole income come from such system sales is quite irrational of your part.

> Did you ask the users of the system or you just assume they don't want one?

I'm pretty sure the "users" of the system are mostly programmers who write batch jobs.

I would hope the users of a system designed to predict the weather are actual meteorologists.

You better hopw that they are programmers. Meteorologists provide the algos and calculations, programmers (or if you prefer, scientists programmers) then implement it. Scientists focused on science don't have the time to learn good code skills (that's a fact) as there are too many maths and knowledge already in their fields. would not be better if they focus on the science itself?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com