re: #583 austin_blue
Fortran, with sequential updates, is still a very powerful number crunching protocol. Just because algebra is old doesn’t mean it is obsolete.
[Link: en.wikipedia.org…]
It isn’t the number crunching - it is how you organize complexity.
These algorithms are assumably up for constant revision seeing that climate models need to be refined as new relationships are discovered between variables in the climate system. If you want to plow through a dataset linearly, in batch and aren’t apt make the routines continuously more complex, Fortran is fine. So is C. but if the challenge is to model an evolving understanding of a complex system and continually refine it, Fortran is a poor choice.
Java would be a lousy choice too - it has too much overhead for execution, as do just about every other interpreted language that runs on most web servers.
There are techniques for using C++ where you can take advantage of inheritance and other code management facilities yet compile to compact fast executing executables that take advantage of parallel processors.