On 10/17/17 4:40 AM, crimaniak wrote:
On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 22:09:21 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
http://moreisdifferent.com/2015/07/16/why-physicsts-still-use-fortran/
Some good information there!
Especially comments:
George Michaelson • a day ago
One of the saddest moments of my career in computer centre helpdesk was
talking to a chemical engineering student whose PhD basically evaporated
in smoke, as I showed them the 'interesting' experimental results of
their model were the outcome of using un-initialized global common in a
huge fortran program they'd written.
Ouch! I had an experience like that once.
I worked at a company that bought a one-man show's company who had an
impressive load-balancing software we wanted to incorporate in our system.
About 1-2 years into him working at our company, one of our developers
tested it using webbench (all testing had been done by this guy
previously), and was getting terrible numbers. But his tests always
showed really good numbers.
Turns out he was "timing" his benchmarks by starting a separate thread,
then sleeping for 1 second, and then measuring how many requests he
handled in that "1 second". But of course, the system was super-loaded,
so the sleep was going way longer than 1 second, and his numbers looked
great! After we fixed it, the numbers looked horrific and matched webbench.
When this was found out, we kind of moved away from that software, as we
were moving our focus to hardware. I can't imagine how that must have
felt, though.
-Steve
