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Professor Fortran's Encyclopedia

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46 pointspkdpic21 comments

This is related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30123574, which you might want to read first.

I got this book when I was 4. Loved it to bits.

It even had a crafting project of making a PC mockup with paper and glue (which I did).

I remember reading about how everything's gonna have a microprocessor in it, and thinking it's bullshit, surely that's a leap too far.

Fast forward to 2019, after I got a math PhD and was fixing a small bug in Google's sparse SVD library... in Fortran.

Thanks, Professor. You left quite an impression on me.

Has Google open-sourced this sparse SVD library? I have not heard before of the big tech companies using Fortran.

Google has hired R. M. Larsen, who wrote PROPACK[1], and uses it internally.

A heck of a lot of computation is still powered by Fortran. Ever used SciPy / NumPy? Deep down, FORTRAN powers it, via BLAS/LAPACK[2]

A few years back in Cadence, we were still running a lot of FORTRAN code for computational lithography. Not only it's fast (and parallelizable), there are many algorithms that had been fine-tuned over the many years that you can reuse.

Say, we needed to pick a gradient descent implementation for an algorithm that used it. Guess what language the L-BFGS[3] implementation we ended up using was written in - no need, it's FORTRAN, from the year 1983.

[1] http://sun.stanford.edu/~rmunk/PROPACK/

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7496547/does-python-scip...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS

This probably doesn’t count as deliberate use, but GotoBLAS and OpenBLAS still include Fortran code as a baseline. Not sure to which parts of it are actuallu used, but some of them certainly are.

This is a really fun and interesting book to read, assuming you can find a copy and read Russian.

For additional background on the book, the authors and an earlier work by them, check out an interview them here:

Part 1: https://geek-week.imtqy.com/articles/en490092/index.html

Part 2: https://geek-week.imtqy.com/articles/en490918/index.html

Since you (apparently) can read it, page 15 frame 12 of the book (in the original link, he's "cutting" a potato with the knife's handle). Is that lambda calculus? My understanding is that "К" in Cyrillic is the same "K" sound as in the Latin alphabet, but it looks like a typical lambda calculus expression: λ x . x (identity function). And it makes sense, cutting a potato with the handle leaves it unchanged.

I'm just curious why the symbol К is used (visual similarity to λ?) and wondering if there are other similar lambda calculus jokes or references in the book.

It's just the khhh sound of scraping the potato with the handle. Sort of like the POW! in an English language comic is not about exponentiation.

I also thought about that, and thought it might be the case. It just amused me that it worked both ways (if you take the К as an alternative to λ) and I was curious if it was anywhere else in the book. And in an English language comic about math I could see POW (or similar) being used in both ways, as both the conventional sound sense and in a joking math sense (in some context). Since this is a comic about computers, the lambda calculus interpretation (even as a throwaway joke that would go over the reader's head) seemed plausible.

Right but I think the typography/scan quality and not being able to read the rest of the text for context is leading you astray here - this book is roughly at the level of the more basic Usborne books. It's a long, long way from mentioning lambda calculus.

That looks really interesting. Is there a translation anywhere?

> here's a comic book tells what komputerom and what they eat, and I finally realized that in a fairy tale, called the computer, I get in this life is not destined.

I couldn't quite understand this line. Do they mean that they understood after reading this that they could program computers? Like it was their first exposure to programming, or is there some other meaning?

Some idioms were lost in translation, here is a perhaps a bit more literary version

> This was a comic book that described what the compooters[1] are and what to do with them, and I finally realized that I could never get to the fairy land called "minframe" [2] in this life.

[1]: sic, deliberate misspelling

[2]: I could not find a better English translation for the original word "ЭВМ". The acronym stands for " electronic computation machine" which technically just means "computer", but in the sense of "computer occupying a whole room that feeds on punch cards and interns"

Personal computer is ПЭВМ so there's no such connotation.

The book I didn't really like, I think it was too cheesy, but then again I already had a PC at this point.

It's hard to tell since that English bit at the top is badly mangled machine translation - it couldn't figure out the inflected form of 'computer', translated 'machine' as 'car' and who knows what else. It doesn't say (as far as I can reverse-mangle) anything particularly interesting.

There's at least one more book that features these characters: "А я был в компьютерном городе." Half of it is more of this kind of illustrated children's science book, while the other half is a short children's novel that takes place inside a computer town and had characters with names like Basic, Fortran, and Algol.

FORTRAN - my first love -- 16, baffled by girls, I sought refuge in the University's CDC 3100. Hooked for life.

Hear, hear. My story is similar, and different. The first time a girl paid attention to me other than to mock or tease was in community college when Dina bought me lunch in gratitude after I helped her reason about how to solve a FORTRAN homework problem. Nothing romantic, she had a boyfriend, but we stayed friends for years after and it changed how I thought about myself and what was possible.

Great book! Loved it as a child.

Even bought one for my son who's four. The book still rocks.

Where did you find it?

Better translated as "Professor Fortran's Encyclopedia"?

Indeed. We'll change it. Thanks!

Submitted title was "Encyclopedia Professor Fortran" (which does have a Russian sound to it in English).

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