[Info-vax] Is C++ good in scientific computation? Why did Fortran lose its popularity?

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/24/21 1:52 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/23/2021 2:35 PM, ultr... at gmail.com wrote:

[quote from Craig Dedo]
>> Fortran has no politically powerful sponsor or champion. There is no
>> highly influential person or organization in the software development
>> community that is pushing strongly to make Fortran much more popular.
> 
> Python only got one person Guido van Rossum.

Python has had significant investment from many of the behemoths of the
tech industry, including Google's paying Guido's salary while he worked
on Python. My impression is that Guido has not been the only one with
this support, but I have not followed that closely (I do know he is no
longer the Benevolent Dictator For Life and the project is now led by a
steering council).

Microsoft includes Python in Visual Studio.  Pretty much every
introductory programming course these days, university or otherwise,
uses Python. There are many powerful champions of Python. So I really
don't know where one could get the idea that Python "got [sic] one person."

Side note: Python did repeat one of the worst mistakes of Fortran, which
is making whitespace in particular locations significant (column 72
anyone?) :-).

References on sponsors of Python and one of its core add-ons:

<https://www.python.org/psf/sponsorship/sponsors/>

<https://pypi.org/sponsors/>