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Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse

10/01/2023

People often are surprised to find out how prevalent Fortran is in
the real world. For instance many climate models were originally
written, and continue to be maintained in Fortran (languages like
Julia are attempting to unseat it, but I think Julia would be a
better language if it had an ISO standard associated with it).

One of the reasons Fortran still works is longevity. It's much easier
to build on something that was originally developed in Fortran (which
is backwards compatible), rather than starting from scratch. People
always make is seem so easy, but many a re-engineering project has
come unstuck because of a failure to understand how the original
software worked. Fortran is also exceptionally good at doing math,
and climate models are nothing if not all about crunching data and
doing math.

That's not to say there aren't challenges - but find me a language
that doesn't have some challenges. I don't like it when people try to
explain that "Python would be better", because of some cockamamie
idea that its syntax is better than Fortran. Sure it's more succinct,
but that's purely for the benefit of the programmer, not the machine.
And who is to say explicit typing doesn't actually add some level of
clarity, which is extremely important in programs that perform
calculations.

So how many climate models are written in Fortran? Mendez et al. [1]
analyzed 16 well known climate models in 2014, all were Fortran. So
in reality, most if not all are written in Fortran. Why do they still
use Fortran?

  * Performance - Fortran is fast, in cases faster than C, and
    climate modelling, like so much scientific computing is about
    speed. (Check out [2] for language benchmarks).
  * Parallelism - Performance necessitates parallelism, and Fortran
    was doing that before other languages even knew what it was.
  * Reuse - Backwards compatibility means that existing libraries can
    easily be reused.
  * Arrays - Fortran treats arrays with the respect they should have.
    It supports multi-dimensional arrays, slicing, reduction,
    reshaping, and many optimizations for array based calculations
    like vectorization.
  * Longevity - Climate models and the like can't be implemented in
    languages that aren't (i) backwards compatible, and (ii) always
    change. If you write code in Fortran today, it is still likely to
    work in 20 or 30 years time.
  * Effort - Do you know how much effort would be involved in
    re-engineering a model? New languages are problematic.
  * MPI - The message passing Interface (MPI) is the gateway to
    high-performance computing, and Fortran handles it very well.

Fortran was designed for scientific computing. Sure Fortran is old,
but so is Unix, and C as well. Just because languages like Julia are
newer, doesn't mean it's better. Everyone thought C++ would be some
sort of coding saviour as well, and look how well that turned out.
People sometimes think that if something is written in a language
like R, then it is pure R... but fail to understand that R itself is
not pure R. R is itself composed of code made up of R, C, and
Fortran.

More info:

 1. Mendez, M., Tinetti, F.G., Overbey, J.L., "Climate models:
    Challenges for Fortran development tools", in 2nd Int. Workshop
    on Software Engineering for High Performance Computing in
    Computational Science & Engineering (2014).
 2. The Computer Language Bennchmarks Game

P.S. Fortran often appears on those "outdated languages" lists, but
the lists are often compiled by people who have little or no clue
about anything to do with computing, let alone programming languages.

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Posted in: Fortran, legacy, programming | Tagged: benefits of Fortran
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