[Info-vax] Development Tooling (was: Re: Opportunity for VSI?)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-12-16 17:51:25 +0000, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply said:

> In article <pv5u3p$ilh$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
> <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:
> 
>>> ...Many people do...namely people who write their own applications.  
>>> They need an OS and  a compiler, that's it...
>> 
>> That's true, as far as it goes.  Developers can work with an operating 
>> system and just a compiler.  Though developers are a fickle lot.
> 
> It's true for essentially all of scientific computing; all 
> "applications" are written by the "developers".  No-one cares about a 
> bells-and-whistles spreadsheet or whatever.

Scientific computing was migrating off of VAX/VMS in the late 1980s and 
into the 1990s, as the VAX prices and the performance became 
uncompetitive.

The Alpha price and performance brought some of that activity back to 
DEC, though not to OpenVMS Alpha.

As part of that shift, DEC shifted the VAX/VMS and later OpenVMS sales 
and marketing emphasis and the enhancements-related work toward those 
needed for commercial and business applications, and away from 
scientific computing.

As you're well aware, a whole lot of scientific computing is over on 
Linux now, with all the benefits and the issues that can arise with 
that platform.  There are targeted distributions here such as the 
RHEL-related Scientific Linux distro from Fermilab.

For the folks that have been writing the same sorts of Fortran code, 
and using the same practices and tooling over the years, yes, OpenVMS 
can be a good fit.  The environments and the expectations match.  
Though nobody is happy with the old FORTRAN code, there's a lot of it 
still around that hasn't been migrated forward to more recent Fortran, 
too.

For folks working on scientific computing that want or need OpenCL, 
OpenML, OpenGL, Vulkan, or MPI or OpenMP or grid software, or 
distributed scheduling, R, or visualization support, or an IDE or other 
development tooling, not so much.  OpenVMS usage is more problematic, 
with gaps and/or with older revisions available.

Spreadsheets are handy for some tasks, including various data 
visualization tasks.  But you know that.

OpenVMS just isn't going to be big again in scientific computing.  Not 
any time soon...






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