[Discuss] "Fortran father John Backus, dead at 82"

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-03-20 16:59-0700 Lloyd Budd wrote:

> Seems relevant with the recent Fortran discussions:
>
> "Backus helped define the "hacker ethic". Leading a small team to do
> great things quickly, and leverage their own mistakes in order to
> learn, Backus shattered the paradigm of 1950s corporate IBM and,
> developed a language that is only now beginning to fade into history."

I suspect it is not going to fade, and in fact the future of fortran is
looking pretty bright right now.  The reason why I make this claim is there
is a ton of "work horse" fortran 77 code out there for scientific
computations despite some of the problems with the fortran 77 language.
(Case in point was a fortran contract I did several years ago where I was
dealing with a quarter-million line (!) code base.)

Most of those fortran 77 problems (e.g., language was too low-level, no type
checking of argument lists with a lot of accidents waiting to happen unless
you were careful) have been solved for fortran 95, gfortran seems (from my
dabbling with it) to be an adequate free fortran 95 compiler even now
although it is not complete, and there are many commercial fortran compilers
as well. Thus, there is a lot of different choices for an upgrade path for
all that old working fortran code, and I suspect many new fortran 95
development efforts will occur as well as scientists do new kinds of
numerical modelling with the enormous computer power that is now available.

>
> Backus is quoted as saying, "You need the willingness to fail all the
> time." "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very
> hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that
> over and over until you find one that does work."
>
> http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/03/20/fortran-father-john-backus-dead-at-82/

Great quote. I wish somebody had beaten that philosophy into my head when I
was a lot younger.... :-)

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________