[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Steve Johnson]

Let me offer a somewhat different perspective on FORTRAN.  When an
airplane is designed, the design undergoes a number of engineering
tests under simulation at the design stage.  Many countries require
that these simulation runs be archived for the lifetime of the
airplane so that, in the event of a crash, they can be run again with
the conditions experienced by the aircraft to see whether the problem
was in the design.  Airplanes commonly take 10 years from first
design to first shipment.  And then are sold for 10 years or so. 
And the planes can fly for up to 30 years after that.   So these
tests need to be written in a computer language that can be run 50
years in the future -- that is a stipulation of the archive
requirement.  There really aren't any alternative languages that I'm
aware of that could meet this criterion -- that's particularly true
today, when there is a sea change from serial to parallel programming
and it's hard to pick a winner with five decades of life ahead of
it...

Does anyone have any candidates?

Steve


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180317/632600a7/attachment.html>