CUDA Released in Basic | Hacker News Reader

CUDA Released in Basic

developer.nvidia.com

It's all ha-ha until you realize that some versions of Dartmouth BASIC actually had matrix operation primitives, and so might've been a good choice for implementing GPU-accelerated linear algebra kernels. (It was also compiled; Microsoft basically established BASIC's reputation as a slow language by shipping an interpreter-only version for the Altair and later machines. As usual, Microsoft gonna Microsoft.)

How would people feel about CUDA programming in a simplified Fortran? That's just a step away from BASIC.

CUDA Fortran was first released in 2007 and now has multiple implementations.

Given that the go-to linear-algebra libraries for the past N decades (BLAS, Linpack, etc.) are Fortran, I'd suspect that neural-network people would be rather okay with it, esp. if it could be driven with a Python wrapper (which is how most people use BLAS and Linpack today).

BASIC is roughly to Fortran what Rust is to C++: its creators set out to design a "better Fortran", and realized that the limitations and complexities necessitated creating a whole new language.

I don't think that BASIC was ever meant to be a better Fortran. Can you substantiate that claim?

> Along with the time sharing system came the new language which they decided to call BASIC. At first it was going to be a subset of Fortran but they decided that no subset of any existing language would be complete enough.

https://www.i-programmer.info/history/people/739-kemeny-a-ku...

> Kemeny and Kurtz realized that if they wanted to reach everyone on campus with their time-sharing vision, they needed to simplify the user interface. The popular programming languages at the time, FORTRAN and ALGOL, were "just too complicated," Kurtz recalled. "They were full of punctuation rules, the need for which was not completely obvious and therefore people werenʼt going to remember."

https://fas.dartmouth.edu/news/2024/11/remembering-computing...

The truth is not as strong as I had claimed. BASIC's expressions kinda resemble Fortran's, probably because that was what was lying around. It seems that an easier version of an existing language is what Kurtz wanted, but Kemeny was more interested in starting from scratch, which view Kurtz came around to. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC):

When the topic of a simple language began to be considered seriously, Kemeny immediately suggested writing a new one. Kurtz was more interested in a cut-down version of FORTRAN or ALGOL.[14] But these languages had so many idiosyncrasies that Kurtz came to agree with Kemeny:

If we had corrected FORTRAN's ugly features, we would not have FORTRAN anymore. I reluctantly had to agree with John that, yes, a new language was needed.[15]

Might as well stay off the internet on April 1st.

It's definitely an April 1st joke but it also is real?!

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