Exactly. I'm a numerical scientist (does a lot of oceanography) who started out around 1989 in c "for speed". After 15 years of wrestling with hand rolling up, unrolling, threading, rolling for the simplest matrix multiplication, someone said "you should try modern Fortran, it's not like F77 was when you started."
my GOD what a breath of fresh air. Natural array expressions, operations slicing, sizing, etc. (talking about the core language not libraries) and incredible, incredible speed. Revolutionary, and makes me deeply regret those years I recited the "c is fast" mantra.
Mind you, the compiler that handles the optimizations is written in c. But you know - I don't need to know about that;in c, I always felt like I was half writing-the-compiler anyway. Thankfully, I'm not anymore.
Now the thing is, I tell people this and they look at me like I'm crazy ("fortran? no way!") This article... I love a little validation.
Believe me, I'm current with c/c++ fixes, tricks, and libraries up to about 2007 at least. About every two years during this long period of self-abuse I'd go library-hunting and find some piece of c++ that marginally improved things; the sheer brainpower (mine and the library-writers) wasted on these workarounds is staggering.
Libraries are very nice, but better to start with a suited base-language.
Edit: not to say that my years in that landscape were wasted; other fortran-only programmers look at me as crazy when I create the simplest "object" using the fortran-equivalent of struct; to them, life is nothing but wild unencapsulated matrices deserving to be free.
my GOD what a breath of fresh air. Natural array expressions, operations slicing, sizing, etc. (talking about the core language not libraries) and incredible, incredible speed. Revolutionary, and makes me deeply regret those years I recited the "c is fast" mantra.
Mind you, the compiler that handles the optimizations is written in c. But you know - I don't need to know about that;in c, I always felt like I was half writing-the-compiler anyway. Thankfully, I'm not anymore.
Now the thing is, I tell people this and they look at me like I'm crazy ("fortran? no way!") This article... I love a little validation.