"Richard O'Keefe" <rao...@gmail.com> writes:

> Thus I hypothesise that there is room for Smalltalk as a tool for
> *generating* and configuring HPC code.

Yes. But it will be hard to convince people that Smalltalk is a better
choice than Python (well established in HPC as you say) for this use
case.

> My main worry is that when it comes to "bet your whole economy"
> software and worse still, "bet the entire global economy and human
> happiness for centuries" software like climate models, it's
> appropriate to use the very highest quality assurance tools practical,
> including *serious* verification.  That's not common practice.

Indeed, and that's one of my main worries in computational science as
well. There is a culture of scientific validation, but not of technical
verification of artifacts such as code.

My own project in this space (implemented in Pharo) aims at supporting
*human* verification for the aspects that no automatic tool can possibly
verify. In technical terms, that's verifying the formal specification
rather than the implementation of some method. The first step, which I
have made good progress on, is a specification language for scientific
models and methods that human readers would be happy to proofread.
Details:

   https://github.com/khinsen/leibniz-pharo/
   https://science-in-the-digital-era.khinsen.net/#Leibniz

Konrad

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