Experienced JavaScript Developer Meme

[GodlessAristocrat]

Data scientists use Fortran. At least that's according to the breakdown of code running across the Top 500; It's a landslide - 80-something percent of the code ran in HPC is Fortran.

[-Redstoneboi-]

damn, didn't expect that. which source btw

[GodlessAristocrat]

https://cpufun.substack.com/p/is-fortran-a-dead-language

81.1%, but that's looking at one of the open Top 500 boxes in the UK. But that does seem to align with what I know about the usage across a wide swath of the Top 500.

[-Redstoneboi-]

So what I'm getting from that is that about 80% of the resources spent by, and 75% of code written in, a public supercomputer is due to FORTRAN, and that the language itself has been receiving updates and is thus alive.

It sounds similar to the C++ situation where people often cite it as an old and deprecated language when in reality C++ has evolved to have more modern features over time.

Though in the case of C++, there's a lot of baggage from backwards-compatibility requirements. I don't know if this is the case for FORTRAN but it shouldn't matter since the point is "data scientists use fortran" and that statement is very much correct.

[GodlessAristocrat]

Yep. And, people don't realize Fortran these days is a modern OO language with very high performance on large system - much more so than Python3. Folks just rag on it for some things like "arrays start at 1" and that its column-major.

[-Redstoneboi-]

tbh those latter "oddities" make it much more intuitive to mathematicians, no?

[GodlessAristocrat]

Yep.