Hacker News Reader

Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

Why learn Fortran? If you want nice things stop propping up dinosaurs. Let it die already.

Teach them numerical algorithms and have the students contribute to a better language's BLAS, LAPACK, or numerical library like numpy, jax, scipy, etc. Be part of the solution.

View on HN

fortran is still very much the GOAT when it comes to numerical methods. to the point where all the modern fancy numerical methods libraries still squeeze out performance by calling out to libraries implemented in fortran. Its far from dying. its very good at its niche.

This isn't true. Openblas and MKL are both C/C++ with assembly hardcoded microkernels. SciPy is in the process of removing the last of their Fortran because no one wants to maintain it, and newer methods in other languages are faster. Fortran hasn't been in the core of everything for decades.

For better or worse, Fortran is still a popular language to write clever PDE schemes in, as it maximizes "time to first, fast-enough-running code".

But for anything with a userbase of more than ~15 people, C/C++ are widely preferred.

Julia is starting to pick up steam here. It's a lot easier to write mixed precision algorithms in since the type system is pretty much designed for efficiently writing generic algorithms (and it doesn't hurt that Julia's ODE solvers are SOTA)

> Julia is starting to pick up steam here

First time I saw this claim was over 9 years ago.

We must disclose that @adgjlsfhk1 works for JuliaComputing. Sometimes they forget to do so on their own.

LAPACK is still Fortran, even in OpenBLAS where they only have f2c translated codes but hardly any assembly kernels.

Fortran has modern versions and is much nicer for writing numerical code than C, C++, Rust, etc...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com