It often feels like in actual features we’re regressing, because we get blinded by cool modern features and follow them too far, losing the balance needed to stay in a sweet spot.
I was forced to make the full time switch to Linux last year by Microsoft's dull policies around hardware requirements for Windows 11 (Windows 10 was also no longer an option). I had dipped my feet into trying linux over the years, but I guess I wasn't ready until MSFT pushed me. Now I can say that I will never look back and I'm super happy to see some of my friends and coworkers in physics/astronomy talking about making the switch with me after seeing how it's going for me.
I want to contribute to other #FOSS projects in my spare time as well, and of course make some friends along the way.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
“Haha lol banks use 60 year old programming languages!”
Yes, young whippersnapper, that’s because they need things to be reliable and not change all the time, the code probably has to run for another 60 years.
“Modern” devs could learn a lot from not trying chase every trendy new framework and every shiny new programming language.
I published my first academic paper thirty years ago.
Overnight, a researcher contacted me to ask if I had the data for the main figure in the paper so that they could reproduce it.
Could I help? The data was from the time before Windows, 5.25-inch floppy discs, and graphs sent from a Unix environment directly to a printer for redrawing for publication by a cartographer.
You bet! In my archive, there was the original input data and code (Fortran77). And now shared.
Linked in the article is a paper titled "An evaluation of risks associated with relying on Fortran for mission critical codes for the next 15 years" from Los Alamos National Laboratory:
Here is another #RosettaCode entry, in a dialect of Lisp that annoys me a whole lot, with compilers whose error messages make #ATS error messages look easy, but which I insist on using for these tasks, just the same:
I did some #math this time. It’s a catenary (the curve of a loosely hanging rope) made by drawing lines perpendicular to a tractrix. (The tractrix itself is not depicted.)
Interesting report: "An evaluation of risks associated with relying on Fortran for mission critical codes for the next 15 years," Los Alamos National Lab. Finds that it's very likely they will be unable to staff #Fortran projects with top computer scientists/engineers, and even chance they can get computational scientists…
TIL: Even if you couldn't afford disk OR tape for your IBM 360, you could still get an all-card OS and Fortran IV too! (1966). Punched cards were a primary storage medium -- until well into the 70s, a box of punched cards was way more memory than most machines had as core. 2000 cards * 80 bytes = 160K #ComputerHistory#Fortran