Last Day in the Monastery

Today's my last day as a Perl guy.

From next week, I'm going back to my Fortran roots. I'll be programming mesoscale wind models for wind energy resource analysis. It's strange to think I'll be using essentially the same programming language that my dad used nearly forty years ago.

I don't think I'll entirely give up Perl; indeed, it was Perl's flexibility in munging wind data (compared to DEC Fortran and DCL) that got me into it in the mid-90s. I have a feeling that there will be a lot of Perl glue and prototyping turning up in my projects.

PerlMonks has been incredibly useful to me, for which you all have my profuse thanks. I hope that some of my nodes prove useful to future monks.

Anyway, keep the heid, keep making the tablet, and make friends with your local wind turbine.

--
bowling trophy thieves, die!

Comment on Last Day in the Monastery

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Last Day in the Monastery by halley (Prior) on Mar 31, 2004 at 16:14 UTC
Believe me, Perl and FORTRAN can fit nicely together. Perl is great as a glue language, where it can automate a pipeline of smaller FORTRAN programs very nicely, and provide quick and dirty user interfaces; these are both tasks where FORTRAN is pretty poor. Keep the calculations in FORTRAN, and leave the bulk of interactions and interconnections to the scripts which call them. Also check PDL for some higher performance number-crunching in Perl itself. -- `[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]`	[reply]
•Re: Last Day in the Monastery by merlyn (Sage) on Mar 31, 2004 at 18:14 UTC
You might want to take Template Toolkit with you. Before long, you'll be turning fortran into ratfor, and writing entire Fortran programs in three lines of code (expanded to 2300 lines by Template). -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply]
Re: •Re: Last Day in the Monastery by Willard B. Trophy (Hermit) on Mar 31, 2004 at 18:52 UTC
Well, this is a Fortran-95 shop, so I think ratfor might be a little behind the times. Fortran has objects and pointers now. Who knew? -- bowling trophy thieves, die!	[reply]
Re: Last Day in the Monastery by flyingmoose (Priest) on Mar 31, 2004 at 18:49 UTC
You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.	[reply]
Re: Last Day in the Monastery by duff (Parson) on Mar 31, 2004 at 18:35 UTC
Hey! Don't give up on perl just because you've got to do some fortran. Recode some of those mesoscale wind models in perl using PDL! :-) duff	[reply]
Re: Last Day in the Monastery by gmpassos (Priest) on Apr 01, 2004 at 05:32 UTC
Take a look in parrot. If I'm not wrong they already have something of FORTRAN there, and on Linux you already can build a binary version of your parrot code. Graciliano M. P. "Creativity is the expression of the liberty".	[reply]
Re: Last Day in the Monastery by JSchmitz (Canon) on Mar 31, 2004 at 19:38 UTC
there are lots of young turks in the wings ready to take up the heed!	[reply]