A What Test?

We all know what happens when you make assumptions. Of course, when things are obvious to ourselves, we tend not to notice the possibility they may not be obvious to others. Mea culpa, I made exactly that mistake recently. But in my aspirations to teach software development, that provides me with a great opportunity. I …

Which kinds are real?

A discussion starting on the Fortran Discourse, got me thinking about how Fortran libraries should support multiple kinds of floating point numbers? I immediately recalled Dr. Fortran's blog post, but that didn't really consider the idea from a library developer's perspective, just a standalone application developer. That's understandable since at that time there wasn't an …

Setting Up Windows Fortran Development

If you're just getting started with Fortran and your primary computer is Windows, figuring out how to get everything you need installed and configured can be a bit tricky. In this post I'll provide links and some details for how I set up a Windows machine for doing Fortran development. Your mileage may of course …

The Fortran Package Manager’s First Birthday

It was about 1 year ago that I attended my first Fortran standards committee meeting, more formally known as a J3 committee meeting. It was there that I met some brilliant people I'm now happy to call colleagues. It was a very interesting experience, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in learning about how …

Is Research Software Likely to Remain a Tangled Mess?

No. I recently came across a post in the fortran-lang forum referring to a blog post that makes an assertion that research software is likely to remain a tangled mess. I have a sufficient amount to say that should hopefully refute such an assertion, and give us some hope for the future. One of the …

Communicating with Whom?

Most lay people and programmers early in their career begin with the assumption that we write code to communicate to the computer what we'd like it to do, and how. While this is partly true, it misses a much more important audience; people. And for much greater reason than humans must be able to maintain …

Difficulties With Test Metrics

The answer to the question of whether we should write automated test suites has largely been settled. We absolutely should write unit tests, and possibly even integration and end-to-end tests. But as acceptance of this practice grew, and adoption became more widespread, a follow-up question arose; How many tests should we write? How do we …

A Model For Parallel Testing In Fortran

The other day, a friend of mine and I were working together to add some tests to a library of utilities he wanted to put together. He was keen to get some experience with my testing framework, so we decided to do some work on it together. He does a lot of parallel programming, and …

With A Little Help From My Friends

I spent last week at my first Fortran Standards Committee meeting. It was a pretty interesting experience. Everyone there was brilliant, and interested in trying to do a good job improving the language. And yet, it was still somehow very disfunctional. The committee is comprised mainly of representatives from compiler vendors/writers, with a few representatives …

Stick to Your Principles

I've been using Fortran for a long time, but I've only recently started interacting with people trying make changes to the language. It's been a bit of an eye opening experience. I had intuitions about what it would be like and how things happen in language design, but now I've got first hand experience, and …