24 Feb
2020
24 Feb
'20
3:32 p.m.
"I'd go to the local University that teaches Fortran and ask around."
Aye, there's the rub.
SIUE (Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville) still had a COBOL
curriculum a decade ago, and they might still. They were fairly forthright
in training people to go work at a lot of the stodgier St. Louis
enterprises that still had a large COBOL footprint (AB, Enterprise
Rent-A-Car, Caterpillar, et al). By 2010, though, Express Scripts was
trying hard to move away from its ANCHOR (COBOL) system and
whatever-it-was-they-had running on VMS, and it sure felt like in the early
2010s STL was mostly Java EE.
I would think that FORTRAN is likelier to be passed around as folk wisdom
and ancient PIs (uh, Primary Investigators, not the detective kind)
thrusting a dog-eared FORTRAN IV manual at their new grad students and
snarling "RTFM!" than as actual college courses.
That said, if you want to learn FORTRAN and don't mind working from modern
FORTRAN back, I really was impressed by https://lfortran.org/ , and the
ability to run it in a JupyterLab playground environment is fantastic for
quick-turnaround experimentation. Plus Ondřej Čertík
<https://ondrejcertik.com/> was fun to talk to and hang out with.
On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 8:19 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:40:10AM +0100, Sijmen J.
Mulder wrote:
My training was 35 years ago, I have no idea where to go look for this
stuff now. I googled and didn't find much. I'd go to the local
University that teaches Fortran and ask around.
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Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
> Fortran programmers are formally trained (at least I
> was, there was a whole semester devoted to this) in accumulated errors.
> You did a deep dive into how to code stuff so that the error was
reduced
each time
instead of increased. It has a lot to do with how floating
point works, it's not exact like integers are.
I was unaware that there's formal training to be had around this but
it's something I'd like to learn more about. Any recommendations on
materials? I don't mind diving into Fortran itself either. 
24 Feb
24 Feb
4:15 p.m.
New subject: [COFF] Fwd: Old and Tradition was V9 shell
First please continue this discussion on COFF (which has been CC'ed).
While Fortran is interesting to many, it not a UNIX topic per say.
Also, as I have noted in other places, I work for Intel - these comments
are my own and I'm not trying to sell you anything. Just passing on 45+
years of programming experience.
On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:34 AM Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I would think that FORTRAN is likelier to be passed
around as folk wisdom
and ancient PIs (uh, Primary Investigators, not the detective kind)
thrusting a dog-eared FORTRAN IV manual at their new grad students and
snarling "RTFM!" than as actual college courses.
FWIW: I was at CMU last week recruiting. Fortran, even at a leading CS
place like CMU, is hardly "folk wisdom". All the science PhD's (Chem, Mat
Sci, Bio, Physics) that I interviewed all knew and used Fortran (nad listed
on their CV's) as their primary language for their science.
As I've quipped before, Fortran pays my own (and a lot of other people's
salaries in the industry). Check out:
https://www.archer.ac.uk/status/codes/ Fortran is about 90% of the codes
running (FWIW: I have seen similar statistics from other large HPC sites -
you'll need to poke).
While I do not write in it, I believe there are three reasons why these
statistics are true and* going to be true for a very long time*:
1. The math being used has not changed. Just open up the codes and look
at what they are doing. You will find that they all are all solving
systems of partial differential equations using linear algebra (-- see the
movie: "Hidden Figures").
2. 50-75 years of data sets with know qualities and programs to work
with them. If you were able to replace the codes magically with something
'better' - (from MathLab to Julia or Python to Java) all their data would
have to be requalified (it is like the QWERTY keyboard - that shipped
sailed years ago).
3. The *scientists want to do their science* for their work to get their
degree or prize. The computer and its programs *are a tool* for them
look at data *to do their science*. They don't care as long as they
get their work done.
Besides Adam's mention of flang, there is, of course, gfortran; but there
are also commerical compilers available for use: Qualify for Free Software
| Intel® Software
<https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/qualify-for-free-software> I
believe PGI offers something similar, but I have not checked in a while.
Most 'production' codes use a real compiler like Intel, PGI or Cray's.
FWIW: the largest number of LLVM developers are at Intel now. IMO,
while flang is cute, it will be a toy for a while, as the LLVM IL really
can not handle Fortran easily. There is a huge project to put a number of
the learnings from the DEC Gem compilers into LLVM and one piece is gutting
the internal IL and making work for parallel architectures. The >>hope<<
by many of my peeps, (still unproven) is that at some point the FOSS world
will produce a compiler as good a Gem or the current Intel icc/ifort set.
(Hence, Intel is forced to support 3 different compiler technologies
internally in the technical languages group).
4:19 p.m.
New subject: [COFF] Fwd: Old and Tradition was V9 shell
I probably should have added, it's not just the learnings from DEC Gem
folks, but also the old "Kuck and Associates" team formerly in Champaign
(Intel moved them all to Austin).
On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 11:15 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
First please continue this discussion on COFF (which has been CC'ed).
While Fortran is interesting to many, it not a UNIX topic per say.
Also, as I have noted in other places, I work for Intel - these comments
are my own and I'm not trying to sell you anything. Just passing on 45+
years of programming experience.
On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:34 AM Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I would think that FORTRAN is likelier to be
passed around as folk wisdom
and ancient PIs (uh, Primary Investigators, not the detective kind)
thrusting a dog-eared FORTRAN IV manual at their new grad students and
snarling "RTFM!" than as actual college courses.
FWIW: I was at CMU last week recruiting. Fortran, even at a leading CS
place like CMU, is hardly "folk wisdom". All the science PhD's (Chem, Mat
Sci, Bio, Physics) that I interviewed all knew and used Fortran (nad listed
on their CV's) as their primary language for their science.
As I've quipped before, Fortran pays my own (and a lot of other people's
salaries in the industry). Check out:
https://www.archer.ac.uk/status/codes/ Fortran is about 90% of the codes
running (FWIW: I have seen similar statistics from other large HPC sites
- you'll need to poke).
While I do not write in it, I believe there are three reasons why these
statistics are true and* going to be true for a very long time*:
1. The math being used has not changed. Just open up the codes and
look at what they are doing. You will find that they all are all solving
systems of partial differential equations using linear algebra (-- see the
movie: "Hidden Figures").
2. 50-75 years of data sets with know qualities and programs to work
with them. If you were able to replace the codes magically with something
'better' - (from MathLab to Julia or Python to Java) all their data would
have to be requalified (it is like the QWERTY keyboard - that shipped
sailed years ago).
3. The *scientists want to do their science* for their work to get
their degree or prize. The computer and its programs *are a tool*
for them look at data *to do their science*. They don't care as long
as they get their work done.
Besides Adam's mention of flang, there is, of course, gfortran; but there
are also commerical compilers available for use: Qualify for Free
Software | Intel® Software
<https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/qualify-for-free-software> I
believe PGI offers something similar, but I have not checked in a while.
Most 'production' codes use a real compiler like Intel, PGI or Cray's.
FWIW: the largest number of LLVM developers are at Intel now. IMO,
while flang is cute, it will be a toy for a while, as the LLVM IL really
can not handle Fortran easily. There is a huge project to put a number of
the learnings from the DEC Gem compilers into LLVM and one piece is gutting
the internal IL and making work for parallel architectures. The >>hope<<
by many of my peeps, (still unproven) is that at some point the FOSS world
will produce a compiler as good a Gem or the current Intel icc/ifort set.
(Hence, Intel is forced to support 3 different compiler technologies
internally in the technical languages group).
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days inactive
1533
days old
2 comments
2 participants
participants (2)
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Clem Cole