To Konrad Hinsen: you HERO. On Thu, 26 Jan 2023 at 02:40, Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net> wrote:
"Richard O'Keefe" <raoknz@gmail.com> writes:
Thus I hypothesise that there is room for Smalltalk as a tool for *generating* and configuring HPC code.
Yes. But it will be hard to convince people that Smalltalk is a better choice than Python (well established in HPC as you say) for this use case.
My main worry is that when it comes to "bet your whole economy" software and worse still, "bet the entire global economy and human happiness for centuries" software like climate models, it's appropriate to use the very highest quality assurance tools practical, including *serious* verification. That's not common practice.
Indeed, and that's one of my main worries in computational science as well. There is a culture of scientific validation, but not of technical verification of artifacts such as code.
My own project in this space (implemented in Pharo) aims at supporting *human* verification for the aspects that no automatic tool can possibly verify. In technical terms, that's verifying the formal specification rather than the implementation of some method. The first step, which I have made good progress on, is a specification language for scientific models and methods that human readers would be happy to proofread. Details:
https://github.com/khinsen/leibniz-pharo/ https://science-in-the-digital-era.khinsen.net/#Leibniz
Konrad