Why Physicists Still Use Fortran

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 10/17/17 4:40 AM, crimaniak wrote:
> On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 22:09:21 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> http://moreisdifferent.com/2015/07/16/why-physicsts-still-use-fortran/
>>
>> Some good information there!
> 
> Especially comments:
> 
> George Michaelson • a day ago
> One of the saddest moments of my career in computer centre helpdesk was 
> talking to a chemical engineering student whose PhD basically evaporated 
> in smoke, as I showed them the 'interesting' experimental results of 
> their model were the outcome of using un-initialized global common in a 
> huge fortran program they'd written.

Ouch! I had an experience like that once.

I worked at a company that bought a one-man show's company who had an 
impressive load-balancing software we wanted to incorporate in our system.

About 1-2 years into him working at our company, one of our developers 
tested it using webbench (all testing had been done by this guy 
previously), and was getting terrible numbers. But his tests always 
showed really good numbers.

Turns out he was "timing" his benchmarks by starting a separate thread, 
then sleeping for 1 second, and then measuring how many requests he 
handled in that "1 second". But of course, the system was super-loaded, 
so the sleep was going way longer than 1 second, and his numbers looked 
great! After we fixed it, the numbers looked horrific and matched webbench.

When this was found out, we kind of moved away from that software, as we 
were moving our focus to hardware. I can't imagine how that must have 
felt, though.

-Steve