Posted on 05/20/2020 9:56:15 AM PDT by grundle
Imperial College’s modelling... could go down in history as the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.
... those of us with a professional and personal interest in software development have studied the code on which policymakers based their fateful decision to mothball our multi-trillion pound economy and plunge millions of people into poverty and hardship. And we were profoundly disturbed at what we discovered. The model appears to be totally unreliable and you wouldn’t stake your life on it.
Imperial’s model appears to be based on a programming language called Fortran, which was old news 20 years ago and, guess what, was the code used for Mariner 1. This outdated language contains inherent problems with its grammar and the way it assigns values, which can give way to multiple design flaws and numerical inaccuracies. One file alone in the Imperial model contained 15,000 lines of code.
Try unravelling that tangled, buggy mess, which looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming. Industry best practice would have 500 separate files instead. In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.
The approach ignores widely accepted computer science principles known as “separation of concerns”, which date back to the early 70s and are essential to the design and architecture of successful software systems. The principles guard against what developers call CACE: Changing Anything Changes Everything.
Without this separation, it is impossible to carry out rigorous testing of individual parts to ensure full working order of the whole.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Oh, heck yeah. Admittedly when I first learned FORTH I tried to recreate all sorts of familiar APL and Lisp idiom, lots of fun, but eventually I grokked the beauty of the scratchpad vernacular. In the early 80's I bought an original IBM PC and sprang for an LMI FORTH cross compiler. Between FORTH and the DOS disassembler (which would also assemble, heheh) I had a marvelous time discovering 8088 bugs.
To this day I kick myself for not taking that FORTH programming job at NRAO in '82...
Wow. What a touchy insecure little weatherman.
How does it feel to be wrong so much.? To intentionally panic people with hysteria?
Feels good that you can’t be fired for being wrong like the rest of us huh?
All your fancy equipment & you can’t tell me the weather for anywhere on the planet with accuracy after today can you?
No. You can’t. Your equipment’s guess is as good as mine, little weatherman.
And why is it called the Cone of UNCERTAINTY”? Aren’t you brainiacs cable of pinpointing exactly where when & extent of damage for hurricanes? No.
Can you predict the exact path of a tornado? No? Shame on you.
The precise next outbreak of wildfires? No.
Pretty useless.
Humans with agendas create computer models.
Goodbye Nelson.
Have fun in your world, where not a single fully trained meteorologist “scientist” can predict the weather accurately. They said it would rain here yesterday. It did not.
All that fancy expensive equipment wasted.
Blaming the miscalculation on Fortran is as specious as the claim that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan wet market. This is another example of a MSM narrative that grows more unbelievable by the day.
FORTRAN is still used quite extensively for serious number-crunching. For instance,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprograms
LOL
Another stupid statement said in ignorance (that I would expect from someone in southern Louisiana). If, in the case of weather, the agenda was accurately trying to predict it - then - yeah - you got us.
Goodbye Karen.
Not all of them.
I'd say that most want to be able to figure out what the future may hold by looking at what the past has been like.
Just because the program results are not the same as what is evident right outside the window, it doesn't mean that any skullduggery was involved.
I would bet that most programmers say; "Ooops!" (or something more colorful) and then gets back to tweaking up the algorithms once more.
FORTRAN is the basis of most numerical electromagnetic design. Most of your antenna designs and some of the semiconductors were researched using it, and when the algorithms are ported to other platforms and languages the results are the same.
Only a few places do real modeling based on probability and conjecture. Many use one type of system because they have investments in a code base. Many also use FORTRAN because experienced, seasoned, professionals know it best. It also has a lot of things coded that worked in other problems.
Blaming FORTRAN is like saying the house was made of pine and not oak, and thats why it burned down.
If the model is terrible the language implementing it doesn’t matter.
This is a poor article.
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