I had a similar upbringing, but in Canada. A lot of this rings true.
Our family doesn't farm anymore,but for different reasons. Still, the pressure to go big or go home exists north of the border, too.
I think Adam Smith nailed it back in the 1700s, when he noted that farmers could not take advantage of specialization. They're capitalists and labourers and landlords and semi-professional veterinarians and commodity traders all in one. Without specialization, they're unlikely to ever be very wealthy relative to the amount of labor and capital they input.
The bigger farms can actually hire dedicated mechanics and accountants and such, so it's no surprise they get a better return on investment. That would probably remain true even if they didn't engage in shenanigans like undocumented laborers and excessive pollution, though no doubt those practices help them pull even further ahead.
On a different note, since supply management was mentioned, I can't resist linking to this program: https://youtu.be/3d-FlQHoHpU
Short argument against supply management: it's a regressive tax on people who buy milk, cheese, butter and yogurt.
One of many possible reasons is the way arrays are stored. In a matrix representation, should the memory be laid out one row at a time or one column at a time? It's mostly an arbitrary decision, but different languages have made differennt choices.
If you wanted to take a native Fortran matrix and turn it into a native C matrix, you'd either need to copy everything to re-arrange the in-memory layout or do funky things with the indexing. Neither option is great.
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Bringing it back to a higher level, I'd agree that your point makes sense most of the time. In most cases, the cost of a memcpy(3) would be a rounding error. That's certainly the case for most web applications. In a tight loop in a math-heavy application, though, the standards are a bit higher.
It's not just learnability. In some cases, Fortran can be considered to be faster than C since it can apply something like -fno-strict-alisasing by default.
Not to mention that most compilers have OpenMP suport built-in. Also, there's the tons of heavily-optimized Fortran math libraries that make it easy to take advantage of big machines and big clusters.
Those scientists that are still using Fortran after all these years know what they're doing. It's not that they're ignorant of new technoglogy. A well-informed and open-minded CS person would probably end up using Fortran for these use cases, too.
Our family doesn't farm anymore,but for different reasons. Still, the pressure to go big or go home exists north of the border, too.
I think Adam Smith nailed it back in the 1700s, when he noted that farmers could not take advantage of specialization. They're capitalists and labourers and landlords and semi-professional veterinarians and commodity traders all in one. Without specialization, they're unlikely to ever be very wealthy relative to the amount of labor and capital they input.
The bigger farms can actually hire dedicated mechanics and accountants and such, so it's no surprise they get a better return on investment. That would probably remain true even if they didn't engage in shenanigans like undocumented laborers and excessive pollution, though no doubt those practices help them pull even further ahead.
On a different note, since supply management was mentioned, I can't resist linking to this program: https://youtu.be/3d-FlQHoHpU
Short argument against supply management: it's a regressive tax on people who buy milk, cheese, butter and yogurt.