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by Solvency 894 days ago
I don't get this. It's highly difficult to find vast troves of military reserves (ie: bodies who can do military stuff) in war time. That's what bootcamp and sergeants are for.

Hell my sister (print sales) joined a new firm and she had to spend six weeks in an intense classroom style training program the company ran to get new staff prepared for the nuances of their product.

It seems straightforward to setup a Fortran internal bootcamp for experienced developers at these massive legacy institutions, worth the upfront investment...no?
2 comments
gh02t 894 days ago
Yeah, all of that is part of the long tail. Fortran isn't going away, but with younger people who grew up without Fortran getting into leadership positions momentum is in the favor of moving HPC and sometimes more mundane computational code to C++. It's not just that developers are harder to find, it's that C++ is also offering advantages with better tooling, better libraries and community support, etc. Leveraging (and contributing to) open source is also important for DoE, which is tough in Fortran.

Of course you could make the case for even more modern languages like Rust etc as well, but the national labs are still on the conservative side when making decisions for their big projects. C++ does hit a nice sweet spot in terms of performance, features, and longevity despite the warts.

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dtech 894 days ago
The problem is who is willing to do this?

If you go into such a bootcamp as a fresh grad, you basically pigeonhole yourself into working in that niche forever. You would have a massive setback when switching jobs compared to taking a bogstandard Java job or whatever.

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sfpotter 894 days ago
There are loads of people who'd be willing to do this at a national lab. The bigger problem is that very few national labs are located in places many young people want to live. For the ones that are (LBL), it's competitive to get a job there.

You're also wrong about the setback and being stuck in that niche. Once you learn the first language, more likely than not you'll have opportunities to continue to grow and develop in the role and learn new things. Most people are pretty adaptable.

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