Hacker News: TheRealKing

New comment by TheRealKing in "Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran"

TheRealKing — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:18:41 +0000

Do you realize F95 is over 30 years old? The latest standard is 2023. When people talk about modern Fortran, they usually mean Fortran 2008, 2018, or 2023, or, at worst, Fortran 2003.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Show HN: Punch card simulator and Fortran IV interpreter"

TheRealKing — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:58:16 +0000

None, but nice!

New comment by TheRealKing in "Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)"

TheRealKing — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 14:17:15 +0000

Ada's mechanism is what Fortran has been using and doing for decades.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?"

TheRealKing — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 15:25:43 +0000

I strongly disagree. Arbitrary bounds are tremendously helpful in dealing with arrays whose starting point must be offset.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?"

TheRealKing — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 15:14:51 +0000

That is simply not true. An educated person with minimal programming exposure can readily pick up modern Fortran programming in 1-3 days at a pragmatic level.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?"

TheRealKing — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 01:32:48 +0000

We must disclose that @adgjlsfhk1 works for JuliaComputing. Sometimes they forget to do so on their own.

New comment by TheRealKing in "New horizons for Julia"

TheRealKing — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 04:35:44 +0000

The comments further above on the inherent limitations of the Julia language as a replacement for Fortran or C++ seem to contradict your opinion.

New comment by TheRealKing in "New horizons for Julia"

TheRealKing — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 04:22:42 +0000

Adding to the list is the tragedy of Julia programming language's type system: https://medium.com/@393069484/a-tragedy-of-julias-type-syste...

New comment by TheRealKing in "Lua is so underrated"

TheRealKing — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 01:24:50 +0000

Did you mean, "Julia never found any widespread adoption and remains an obscure, niche language"? Fortran was the world's top programming language until the new millennium and is still among the top ten most popular. Arrays in Fortran can start from any index; the default choice is 1, which can be overridden with literally one keystroke: 0.

New comment by TheRealKing in "The future of Deep Learning frameworks"

TheRealKing — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 19:10:39 +0000

Fortran cannot be placed with C in the same category of low programming productivity.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Calculus with Julia"

TheRealKing — Tue, 21 May 2024 15:41:13 +0000

All of them inherit their syntax from the amazing Fortran array syntax.

New comment by TheRealKing in "LLaMA now goes faster on CPUs"

TheRealKing — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 07:50:55 +0000

No, you can still trust compilers: 1) The hand-tuned BLAS routines are essentially a different algorithm with hard-coded information. 2) The default OpenBLAS uses OpenMP parallelism, so much speed likely originates from multithreading. Set OMP_NUM_THREADS environment variable to 1 before running your benchmarks. You will still see a significant performance difference due to a few factors, such as extra hard-coded information in OpenBLAS implementation.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Why Python's integer division floors (2010)"

TheRealKing — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 16:08:47 +0000

And first of all, Fortran.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Winteracter – The Fortran GUI Toolset"

TheRealKing — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 16:48:54 +0000

Fortran has officially had the concept of modules for 35 years, which just made its way to the C++ world in 2020. It's the people who cannot update and sync with contemporary technology and remain stuck to COMMON blocks.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Is Fortran “A Dead Language”? (2022)"

TheRealKing — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 19:41:22 +0000

As someone who has been using about a dozen programming languages over more than two decades, I completely disagree with your experience, some of which appear to be due to incomplete knowledge of the Fortran programming language, including your statement "lacking in standard IEEE numerical things such as a function to check for nan". Everyone talks about C and C++, but we all know in our hearts how terrible the syntax of these languages is.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Is Fortran easier to optimize than C for heavy calculations?"

TheRealKing — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 16:35:39 +0000

I believe the NAG Fortran compiler does check for some aliasing scenarios if not all. The argument intent is irrelevant.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Road to NumPy 2.0"

TheRealKing — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 16:23:46 +0000

and MATLAB was entirely influenced by Fortran's array-based syntax.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Fortran"

TheRealKing — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 16:20:52 +0000

I guarantee, the answer is "no experience".

New comment by TheRealKing in "Fortran"

TheRealKing — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 20:51:46 +0000

The "Hiring Fortran programmers is risky" argument is incorrect. This is, in fact, the whole point of Fortran, that anyone as dumb as a rock "would" (not "could" or "might") write performant code. There is currently no other language that can achieve this. Any other language claiming this capability is essentially recreating Fortran (perhaps with a slightly different syntax). Fortran Standard has been pursuing this sole goal for 70 years and has become extremely good at it. Your argument applies very well to C++, though. But it's not too hard to catch a novice there, either.

New comment by TheRealKing in "Fortran"

TheRealKing — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 19:56:23 +0000

This process of language love and hatred over a short period is what's called language fad. Ten years ago, people wrote articles praising MATLAB over established languages. I do not recall any of those writings ever mentioning Matlab's licensing as an issue. MATLAB is now >1000 fold better than ten years ago. Yet, the new generation throws it under the bus daily because it's not their favorite. Change is the only constant in the world of programing fashion and language fads.