I feel obligated to fan the flames a bit by pointing to http://www.fortranstatement.com/ a site which advocates discontinuing development of Fortran and does a good job of summarizing the problems with the contemporary development of that language.
I am not convinced that a new high performance language (Chapel, Fortress, etc.) is necessary. Rather, I feel that FORTRAN 77 is a mature tool, and that it, in combination with a powerful dynamic language (Python being my choice) is entirely sufficient for any foreseeable scientific computing. Fortran 90 and successors (F9* in the following) provide a baroque and elaborate effort to bolt modern computing methods over a finely honed special purpose tool (F77) that manages large numerical arrays spectacularly well. It is as if you decided to add a web search engine (an elaborate, developing set of requirements) to grep (a finely honed special purpose tool). It makes much more sense to add greplike features to your websearch tool than to try to foist "Grep95" (competing with the Google search engine) on everyone who ever needs to find a misplaced text file. F77 interfaces smoothly and neatly with Python. F9* continues to be the single most difficult case for interoperability with any other contemporary algorithmic language. Fortunately there is hope within the new standard, where an "interoperability" flag will force F2003 to deliver arrays that are exportable. In exchange for this balkiness, F9* offers crude and verbose implementations of encapsulation and inheritance. I am sure Dr Beliavsky and some others are productive with F9*, but I would strongly advocate against it for anyone in a position to make a choice in the matter. Some people are competent with hand-powered drills, but I wouldn't set up a furniture production line with them on that basis. The performance and library advantages of Fortran are all available in F77. Higher level abstractions can easily be wrapped around the low level structures using Python and f2py. Making the combination performance-efficient requires some skill, but making a pure Fortran implementation efficient does no less so. I don't think we should or can abandon the excellent infrastructure provided by the Fortran of a generation ago. However, I am totally unconvinced that there is a point to a backward compatible extension to F77 that tries to support OOP and other abstractions unimaginable in the early days of Fortran. F77 and its numerical libraries are mature and complete. I think we should treat it as a remarkable set of packages, and move on. For any purposes I know of not involving an existing F9* legacy, I believe that Python plus F77 is as good as or superior to F9* alone. This includes the total time needed to learn the tools, (I think it is easier to learn Python, F77 and f2py than to learn F9* alone to any comparable skill level.) total time needed to develop the code, whole system performance, testability and maintainability. Once Python gets a first-class array type things will be even smoother as I understand it. mt -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
