Showing posts with label Fortran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fortran. Show all posts

13 January 2007

Fortress: Sun's Open Fortran

Ayo, this brings back too many memories of punched cards at midnight:

Sun Microsystems took a new open-source step this week, enlisting the outside world's help in an attempt to create a brand-new programming language called Fortress.

On Tuesday, the company quietly released as open-source software a prototype Fortress "interpreter," a programming tool to execute Fortress programs line by line. "We're trying to engage academics and other third parties," Eric Allen, a Sun Labs computer scientist and Fortress project leader, said about the open-source move.

Fortress is designed to be a modern replacement for Fortran, a programming language born 50 years ago at IBM but still very popular for high-performance computing tasks such as forecasting the weather.

Still, another good move for Sun.

Update: Sun's Simon Phipps has some more details.

10 January 2007

Hardcore Coding

I've never really had the urge to hack on the Linux kernel (not least because I am the world's worst programmer - Fortran, anyone?) but if I did, I'd certainly be using Greg Kroah-Hartman's Linux Kernel in a Nutshell. To both his and O'Reilly's credit, you can download a copy (cc licence), but obviously buying one would be a good idea, too, for all the obvious reasons.

16 August 2006

Monty Python's Flying IDE

The last time I programmed was in Fortran, about 25 years ago. The machine I was using had 2 megabytes of memory - not RAM, but "core": it was an IBM 360, as I recall. I've often thought maybe I should learn a slightly more up-to-date language, and Python has always attracted me.

First, because of the name: I grew up on watching Monty Python when it first came out, and it has shaped my entire Weltanschauung; secondly, because I had the pleasure of interviewing Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, who is a thoroughly nice chap; and thirdly, because the consensus seems to be it's a fine language.

Perhaps I should add a fourth reason: the existence of Stani's Python Editor, which looks to be a splendid open source, cross-platform Python IDE, written, with neat recursiveness, in Python. (Via NewsForge.)