Re: [Maxima-discuss] Schoonship Form

[Raymond T. <toy...@gm...>]

On Sat, Dec 3, 2022 at 12:35 PM Michel Talon <ta...@lp...> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> i have found the following article which may be of interest to some of you:
>
>
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/crucial-computer-program-for-particle-physics-at-risk-of-obsolescence-20221201/?mc_cid=27b6cad563
>
> Some statements are wrong, notably Schoonship was developed by Veltman in
> assembly language of the
>
> CDC7600, a beautiful computer who disappeared long ago. The machine words
> were quite long so Veltman used
>
> parts of words to store information. With this program he did computations
> of radiative corrections in the standard model
>
> which gave him access to the Nobel prize. When the CDC disappeared the
> program was rewritten by Vermaseren in fortran,
>
> and given the name of Form. Presently i suppose such extremely complicated
> computations are no more of
>
> pressing interest to physicists, explaining the disillusion apparent in
> the article. However saying that Mathematica is now
>
> the replacement is perhaps an overstatement. For sure Mathematica is used
> to draw the Feynman diagrams, but computing
>
> them is another story.
>

I just read this article a day or two ago.  My interpretation seems a bit
different from yours.  My reading was the Form is still very important for
particle physics, but since it's not using the language de jour, new
students don't want to learn how to use it or modify it. And since you
can't get tenure for  working on tools, no one wants to improve Form.  And
the author is getting old and no longer wants to work on it.

I vaguely remember a related item where only one person was getting quite
old was maintaining a crucial software infrastructure for the internet.
Maybe the timezone database?  Or NTP?  Or something.

>
> --
> Michel Talon
>
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-- 
Ray