CHIUW 2022: From C and Python to Chapel as My Main Programming Language
This is Nelson Luis Dias's CHIUW 2022 talk, recorded live on June 10, 2022.
Slides available at: https://chapel-lang.org/CHIUW/2022/Di...
Abstract: I describe a trajectory of using a number of programming languages in research, from my early days with Fortran, Pascal and Modula-2, to mainly C and Python during approximately 30 years, and then to Chapel in the last 2 years. During all of this time the desktop PC has been adequate to my processing needs; therefore, this is essentially a "Chapel at the desktop" experience report. Chapel is a very elegant language, providing the power and speed of C and Fortran, while allowing a high degree of abstraction and expressiveness that rivals Python's. I have used it in the last two years for: calculating statistics over massive turbulence datasets, implementing models for lake evaporation in hydrology, and testing some relatively simple numerical solutions of partial differential equations. Its easy portability from C, Fortran and Python allowed fast translation and re-use of my existing libraries. On the few (but not impossible to live with) shortcomings, passing functions as procedure parameters is somewhat unwieldy; re-indexing arrays in procedures is verbose; compilation could be faster; and executables are very large.