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The attempt on side 1 of the cassette didn’t work but fortunately, side 2 is where the action was!

tzx format is a process that could result in permanent failure. He was right! He did have it in the attic…and members of the community considered it valuable.Īs Barry mentioned in his tweet, converting a 40 year old cassette to an archivable. Barry was fairly sure that he’d recently packed a copy of the Mira Fortran Compiler away in his loft and was blissfully unaware of the fact that he was sitting on a missing piece of microcomputing history!

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One of the benefits of 5000+ followers on Twitter is that there’s usually someone who knows something interesting about whatever you happen to tweet about and in this instance, that somebody was my fellow Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, Barry Rowlingson.

However, that compiler was seemingly lost to history and was declared Missing in Action on World of Spectrum.Ī few of us on Twitter enjoyed reading the 1987 review of this Fortran Compiler but since no one had ever uploaded an image of it to the internet, it seemed that we’d never get the chance to play with it ourselves. While basking in some geek nostalgia on twitter, I discovered that my first ever microcomputer, the Sinclair Spectrum, once had a Fortran compiler Until this is resolved, most of us will be relying on the Rosetta2 emulation…which, thankfully, is apparently pretty good! Perhaps Apple should join the club (I suggest they talk to NAG!). Intel, AMD, NEC and NVIDIA/PGI) have their own Fortran compiler that co-exist with the open ones.

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The community needs and will demand open source (or at least free) Fortran compilers if data scientists are ever going to realise the full potential of Apple’s new hardware and I have no doubt that these are on the way. NAG’s Fortran compiler is excellent (it routinely tops independent charts for its checking and Fortran standards compliance for example) but it is commercial. Many projects use OpenBLAS (It’s a popular option in Numpy for example) which…you guessed it…is almost 49% Fortran. Also, if you want good performance for linear algebra operations (Which underpins a huge number of data science and ML algorithms) then you’ll need a good BLAS implementation. Of course, no Scipy means you also can’t have anything that depends on Scipy including things like Keras or Scikit-learn. Here are the GitHub stats for Scipy as of today The Python crowd don’t get away with it either. Numerical computing is hard ( even when all of your instincts suggest otherwise) and when someone demonstrably does it right, it makes good sense to reuse rather than reinvent.Īs a result, with no Fortran, there’s no R.

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More modern systems, such as R, make direct use of a lot of this code because it is highly performant and, perhaps more importantly, has been battle tested in production for decades. Much of the numerical functionality we routinely use today was developed decades ago and released in Fortran. It can come as quite a shock, therefore, to discover that much of our favourite data science tools simply cannot work natively on any system that doesn’t have a Fortran compiler! Routinely mocked by software engineers as old-skool (including me who, over a decade ago, suggested that it shouldn’t be taught to undergraduates), Fortran is the language that everyone overlooks as they spend their days sipping flat-whites in Starbucks while hacking away in MATLAB, R or Python on shiny Macbook Airs.

At the time of writing this is the only Fortran compiler publicly available for Apple Silicon although that will likely change soon as open source Fortran compilers get updated.įortran on your Mac! announce the first Fortran Compiler for Apple Silicon Macs ahead of event #OneMoreThing – learn more #AppleEvent #Apple #AppleSiliconMacs #Fortran #Compiler #SC20 /d03WsGVrUNĪt over 60 years old, Fortran is one of the oldest programming languages that continues to be actively developed and used (The latest language specification is Fortran 2018). Simultaneously, The Numerical Algorithms Group announced that they had ported their Fortran Compiler to the new platform. Earlier this week Apple announced their new, Arm-based ‘Apple Silicon’ machines to the world in a slick marketing event that had many of us reaching for our credit cards.

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