TL;DR

• There was this perplexing article in Ars Technica about replacing Fortran for scientific computation.
• The main performance advantage of Fortran is that its restrictive data structures facilitate vector optimization.
• There are many ways to match and even outperform Fortran, while using other languages.
• But it's OK to use Fortran if you want to.
• Ars Technica notwithstanding, Clojure, Haskell and Julia are not locked in competition to replace Fortran.
• Ars Technica notwithstanding, Fibonacci sequences may be something we learned about once, but it is difficult to disguise their irrelevance to scientific computing.

Preamble

Ten or fifteen pages into a …

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