F#: Starting anew, why F# and not FORTRAN

  • Article

Why FORTRAN and not F#?  image

  • FORTRAN works well, has a strong history and none of that nasty object oriented nonsense.
  • F# works well, based on OCAML, and supports object oriented nonsense

How about F# and FORTRAN?  Can F# use FORTRAN?  Alfred Thompson makes a good point about creating a parallel book on computational languages, an interesting idea for teaching, but not useful if you are trying to get work done. 

The language battles are going to go on, and that is a great way to keep the computer language guys busy, but for me, I am interested in F#, and what it offers to the computational solutions. 

Problems with FORTRAN is that it isn’t being extended, for example the GNU FORTRAN wiki site appears to be viable with bugs being fixed and posted.  The price for FORTRAN appears to be right, it’s free.  Oh wait, so is F# if you use the integrated visual studio process.

So why should a computational scientist use F# over FORTRAN?  Good question, and one that I think needs to be answered.  However, that is not my goal, my goal is to prove that F# can be useful and can serve the academic researcher in a manner that increases the researchers efficiencies.

Language dweebs like me forget that engineers and scientists need to get real work done.

More to come.