godwin@UCI-ICSE.ARPA (Dave Godwin) (10/12/85)
Hi folks. I have a small favor to ask from a lot of people here. This message is addressed to all you folks out there teaching classes at universities, or doing new research and development stuff in large scale industry. From the academic areas, I need to know what languages you are teaching your freshmen. Are these langauges used in later courses they take ? From the R&D people, both in industry and academia, what languages are you using most frequently ? Why do you use that particular language ( please keep this answer down to a few chapters :-> ) ? Please send your replies to me direct; there is no need to clutter any net space up with this. If I get enough replies, I will post a summary to the net. Thank you all much, Dave Godwin University of California, Irvine godwin@icse.uci.edu <---- new arpa mailer address godwin@uci-icse.arpa <---- old arpa mailer address
jcm@ORNL-MSR.ARPA (James A. Mullens) (10/13/85)
From Jim Mullens / Oak Ridge National Lab Oak Ridge is a large government research lab. I, and most people here, are part-time programmers and full time engineering/scientific researchers so we tend to stick with the common coin of the scientific programming world, FORTRAN. Most people have grown up with IBM mainframes and DEC minis, where FORTRAN is well-supported. On DEC minis at least, the language is highly integrated into the operating system, so you can even do most systems programming from FORTRAN... I think the major reason we do not change languages is that we have some very good reasearchers who only know FORTRAN, and could not participate fully in a computer project using another language -- plus, we simply cannot afford to learn a new language just because it is claimed to be the optimum for this year's computer project. Lately I think we are seeing the growth of easy-to-use speciality packages which are almost languages, instead the learning of new languages. CSMP is an early version of this, spreadsheets another, advanced data base packages, statistical packages like SAS, and so on. This is, to me, an interesting way to go... In AI, expert systems are characterized by the incorporation of "domain-specific knowledge" instead of general rules of reasoning. These language-like application packages seem like languages with domain knowledge embedded in them. I would like to hear the results of your survey. Thanks.