🚀 go-pugleaf

In the Great Lwars, one point which commonly comes up is that fortran
is conceptually lowbrow and hence well-suited for the generation of
good code, esp. to exploit various parallel architectures.

I suspect a modest correction to this viewpoint may be in order in
considering the implications of this fact.  I've spent many years in
scientific computation and generally observed a lot of people at work
firsthand.  It may be a pernicious dataset as I see it, but I know
exactly one person who uses parallel hardware.  Every single person I
know who does scientific computation uses single-CPUs.

Parallel hardware is obviously a way to get revolutionary gains in
compute power, but Bill Joy's law suggests that single CPUs will give
tremendous gains without paying any software irritations (they
certainly have done great in the last five years).

If this is indeed the case; that most people use workstation-type
computers, then the argument changes quite a bit.  There may be room
for a language with simple semantics like fortran, but only for those
5% of users who want to use parallel hardware.  I suspect most
scientific computation out there does not know or care about parallel
hardware.

        -ans.
-- 
Ajay Shah, (213)749-8133, ajayshah@usc.edu