Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
Ouch this hurts! I've gotten the same rubbing from RGB. I hate to
say it, but I'm a Fortran programmer ("Hi! My name is Jeff and I'm
a Fortran programmer. Hi! Jeff!"). I know C reasonably well (except
for the esoteric garbage) and I code in Python and the usual assortment
of shell/interpreted language.
[begins preparations for the language war to follow]You haven't lived until you typed in a program printed in a US government book from the 1960s, into your favorite editor, and compiled it ... only to find ... it worked . Considering I did this in early 1990 in grad school ... not bad.
Some folks deride (insert your most hated language here) and promote (insert your most beloved language here). All that matters at the end of the day is that a) your code works, b) is fast, c) someone else can maintain it in 20 years when you are off relaxing on a beach ... studying solitons in nature .... yeah, thats the ticket ...
Sadly there aren't many languages that will get you there. Lots of my old C still works. Little of my old C++ works. All of my old perl and python work. Java, well, never mind. For the most part, the fortran still works.
And that is scary, as I started playing with it in 1984 or so.As for learning it now, sure, if you need it. It compiles down quite nicely. Optimization is quite good for it. There are massive amounts of publicly available libraries for it. C has been gaining in this respect for a while, but we are talking about decades of library building with Fortran in mind. This sort of inertia is very hard to overcome. C++ is a mixed bag: if you really want performance, your C++ is going to look an aweful lot like C (and Fortran) at the lowest levels ... you likely won't be doing deep object data structure dereferences or method calls, or object factories, or ... in deeply nested loops. That is if you care about performance you won't do this.
-- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics LLC, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 786 8423 fax : +1 734 786 8452 or +1 866 888 3112 cell : +1 734 612 4615 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
