ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) (12/05/90)
Why does this debate dominate comp.lang.fortran??
In any such situation, there are bound to be people who're
comfortable with an old technology and there are others who find
the gains of switching to be worth the costs of transition.
Religious wars aren't too useful to anyone concerned.
Consider a close relative of Fortran on this front: Cobol.
Nobody seriously thinks Cobol is a "good" language. Nobody
fights religious wars on it: I've seen people who would argue
for Cobol and I just ignore them.
There are people who have to manage old code or face a MIS
division filled with Cobol programmers who have to write Cobol,
they go ahead and write Cobol. Younger folk who have the opportunity
to make their choices with more freedom rarely touch Cobol
(show me a bright kid leaving college today who's actually
enthusiastic about Fortran).
Like Cobol and the 8088, there are sound commercial reasons why
Fortran is important, and why it's going to take a while to fade
away. To paraphrase Einstein, when people who're in Graduate
school today are in their 40s and 50s, there will be very little
Fortran in the world. Because top-notch people in the professional
world today got their Ph. D.s in the middle ages, they'll
definitely use Fortran. Why bother arguing about it??
--
_______________________________________________________________________________
Ajay Shah, (213)734-3930, ajayshah@usc.edu
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
_______________________________________________________________________________john@ghostwheel.unm.edu (John Prentice) (12/05/90)
In article <28621@usc> ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes: > >Religious wars aren't too useful to anyone concerned. Your posting certainly doesn't sound very secular! >(show me a bright kid leaving college today who's actually >enthusiastic about Fortran). > Ah, are you still beating your wife? Come on, this is a really dogmatic statement. You know, this gets to the heart of the original debate. Computer scientists just can't seem to understand that to most scientists, no programming language is particularly exciting. If that was what turned them one, they probably would have gone into computer science. You can argue all you want about whether this is a good thing or not, but it isn't going to change a thing so long as the debate is only amongst the high priests of programming. If one language is superior to another, frame your arguments in terms of what does it do for the scientist that he needs? Questions of efficiency are important there. So are questions of the difficulty of learning the language (what, you are not up to date on the latest theories of high temperature supercondutivity! Where have you been, reading about programming languages? Come on, get with the program, stay up with the latest physics or get dumped. What? You don't have time to do that and stay up with the latest computer science? Get your priorities straight man, computers are mere tools, not science. ---- YOU THINK THIS SOUNDS STUPID, HEY, THAT IS THE WAY IT IS OUT THERE). Fortran continues to be dominant scientifically because people know it, it is very easy to learn, and it has most of the structures that most scientists need. That may not satisfy the computer community, but that is the reality. If you really want to help scientists (as opposed to convert them), develop automated or symbolic tools for doing scientific calculations so that we don't need to know ANY programming language. Now that would be useful. John Prentice john@unmfys.unm.edu
mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel) (12/05/90)
In article <28621@usc> ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes: >Like Cobol and the 8088, there are sound commercial reasons why >Fortran is important, and why it's going to take a while to fade >away. To paraphrase Einstein, when people who're in Graduate >school today are in their 40s and 50s, there will be very little >Fortran in the world. Because top-notch people in the professional >world today got their Ph. D.s in the middle ages, they'll >definitely use Fortran. I am in graduate school in a very active research group. Almost all of us use Fortran in this department, except for system administration and X-window programming. I think that your comments underestimate the strength of Fortran. Physicists, chemists and other natural scientists have different needs and interests than computer scientists. Fortran suits many of these needs and will continue to be learned by natural scientists although I concede that computer scientists can now safely ignore it. Fortran has returned to the niche for which it was originally intended. Similarly, Cobol is no longer used to write OS's, but will probably continue to be used in business programming as it provides a natural interface in this environment. (I know a lot less about Cobol than I do about Fortran usage... If Cobol is really dying, as the CS types are constantly assuring me, then you may ignore the last sentence of this paragraph.) To draw the analogy out further, I think that at some point in the not too distant future, we'll stop having wars about the usefulness of C for scientific programming. C will eventually and inevitably return to the niche for which it was designed, namely system programming and compiler construction. (C is no more an "everything" language than Fortran or Cobol. You may have some applications of your own to add to my little list of things C is good for, but I doubt that many of you will try to deny that C is better for some things than for others.) By then of course there will be yet another "vegematic" against which we'll all try to defend our respective turfs, partly as a knee-jerk reaction, and partly because Fortran/C/Cobol/whatever works just fine for us and has been around long enough for us to know that it will outlast the current fad. If someone posts a problem to comp.lang.fortran and it turns out that Fortran is a poor tool for the job, then go ahead and suggest an alternative. Trying to debate whether C or Fortran is better without referring to specific problems is pointless. The arguments about whether Fortran or C runs faster are pointless. (All generalizations of the latter sort are liable to be shown wrong by specific examples.) Suggestions to use f2c on perfectly good Fortran code are idiotic unless they are put forward on better grounds than simply "C is better so let's convert everything to it". Now that I have that off my chest, I am curious. Among the natural scientists, what computer languages other than C and Fortran are used? Is anyone out there using something really esoteric? What for? Marc R. Roussel mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca P.S.: I have set the followup to comp.lang.misc. If you wish to reply to the Fortran content of this post, you may wish to edit the newsgroups line.
dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) (12/05/90)
In article <1990Dec5.011038.12618@ariel.unm.edu> john@ghostwheel.unm.edu (John Prentice) writes: >So are questions of the difficulty of learning the language (what, you >are not up to date on the latest theories of high temperature supercondutivity! >Where have you been, reading about programming languages? This is a severe problem. Every time I discover a new, potentially useful tool (FORTRAN, C, LaTeX, UNIX, etc.), I find that I can't get it to do a damned thing without a sustained full-time effort. First one has to plow through the 600 page manual. Then one has to translate one's problem into the new and unfamiliar ``paradigm''. When that goes up in smoke, one has to iterate to remove all one's numerous misunderstandings about the new, non-intuitive system. This takes time and effort, which can only come at the expense of one's primary career responsibilities. If those primary responsibilities are to play games all day with neat computer toys, that's great. Unfortunately, this isn't how most of the world happens to be set up. Don't get me wrong; I remain enthusiastic about all this nifty stuff. But a severe problem exists with all of it, namely, that the people who develop computer tools have little or no concern for minimizing the intellectual overhead that their inventions impose. This sends a clear message of disdain to the users, i.e., "I don't care what you happen to be thinking about most of the time. From now on, you are going to spend your time thinking about what I regard as worthy of thought." Sometimes I wonder if the computer revolution is nothing more than a conspiracy to appropriate the entire intellectual capacity of the industrial world? When I see M.D.'s pissing away their time trying to get their Lotus graphics look pretty, I have to wonder. -- Dan Mocsny Snail: Internet: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu Dept. of Chemical Engng. M.L. 171 dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu University of Cincinnati 513/751-6824 (home) 513/556-2007 (lab) Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0171
gt4512c@prism.gatech.EDU (BRADBERRY,JOHN L) (12/05/90)
In article <28621@usc> ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes: > >Why does this debate dominate comp.lang.fortran?? FORTRAN vs C represents the 'twinkie generation gap!'... > >Religious wars aren't too useful to anyone concerned. I find that the religious wars are fought largely because not enough people on BOTH sides of the issuse have invested enough time and effort LEARNING about the language. C jocks who have written 250K+ lines in FORTRAN are the exception just as FORTRAN jocks who have written 250K+ lines in C! > >... >Fortran in the world. Because top-notch people in the professional >world today got their Ph. D.s in the middle ages, they'll I guess we must ALL learn C to avoid being called old farts! (smile)... -- John L. Bradberry |Georgia Tech Research Inst|uucp:..!prism!gt4512c Scientific Concepts Inc. |Microwaves and Antenna Lab|Int : gt4512c@prism 2359 Windy Hill Rd. 201-J|404 528-5325 (GTRI) |GTRI:jbrad@msd.gatech. Marietta, Ga. 30067 |404 438-4181 (SCI) |'...is this thing on..?'
gt4512c@prism.gatech.EDU (BRADBERRY,JOHN L) (12/05/90)
In article <1990Dec5.011038.12618@ariel.unm.edu> john@ghostwheel.unm.edu (John Prentice) writes: >In article <28621@usc> ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes: >Fortran continues to be dominant scientifically because people know it, it >is very easy to learn, and it has most of the structures that most scientists >need. That may not satisfy the computer community, but that is the reality. This really says it all! If you're an ICS person, you're 'into' languages for their own sake (primarily). Honever, to those who need a TOOL to do a job, a good tool must be effective BUT it must be as easy to learn as possible! Some of the best software in the world dies on a vine because of clumsy operator interfaces... -- John L. Bradberry |Georgia Tech Research Inst|uucp:..!prism!gt4512c Scientific Concepts Inc. |Microwaves and Antenna Lab|Int : gt4512c@prism 2359 Windy Hill Rd. 201-J|404 528-5325 (GTRI) |GTRI:jbrad@msd.gatech. Marietta, Ga. 30067 |404 438-4181 (SCI) |'...is this thing on..?'
mac@harris.cis.ksu.edu (Myron A. Calhoun) (12/06/90)
In article <28621@usc> ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes: [many lines deleted here 'n there] >Consider a close relative of Fortran on this front: Cobol. >Nobody seriously thinks Cobol is a "good" language. Nobody >fights religious wars on it: I've seen people who would argue >for Cobol and I just ignore them. Then maybe you ought to reconsider your openness to reason (NOTE: I'm NOT asking you to reconsider COBOL!-). ****** IF ONE WERE DISCUSSING THE READABILITY OF CODE ******* =================== then well-written COBOL code would probably win hands-down over well- written code of 'most any other languages. COBOL is (or can be) a very READABLE language. FORTRAN might be somewhere in the middle of the list, and C and LISP probably wouldn't even appear in the standings! COBOL has some very useable features (in the context for which it was written) that modern languages don't touch. For example, sorting, searching (even including binary searching) are built-in verbs; it includes decimal arithmetic, etc. And sometimes COBOL has features that more-modern languages like to brag about: "strong typing", for example. In its own way, COBOL has "strong typing", but in describing such features, COBOL texts just don't use the same WORDS as textbooks for newer languages (the term "strong typing" hadn't been "invented" 'way back then, for example.) But COBOL "stinks" in some other ways; I'm not trying to defend or shoot it down; I'm saying that it (like most languages) has its strong and its weak points. And if you reject it out of hand, you may be missing something. --Myron. -- # Myron A. Calhoun, Ph.D. E.E.; Associate Professor (913) 539-4448 home # INTERNET: mac@harris.cis.ksu.edu (129.130.10.2) 532-6350 work # UUCP: ...{rutgers, texbell}!ksuvax1!harry!mac 532-7353 fax # AT&T Mail: attmail!ksuvax1!mac W0PBV @ K0VAY.KS.USA.NA
jav8106@ritvax.isc.rit.edu (Doctor FORTRAN) (12/06/90)
In article <28621@usc>, ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes an open invitation for a Flame War: [senseless prattle deleted] %(show me a bright kid leaving college today who's actually %enthusiastic about Fortran). There are many, many bright kids leaving college today who are actually and genuinely enthusiastic about FORTRAN. Surprise, surprise!! The reason why they are is that they see FORTRAN as quite simply the only game in town. C is fine for computer science, where FORTRAN is weak. But, for physical, mathematical, and life sciences, C's advantages over FORTRAN are of little or no importance. What advantage does C offer the typical scientist or engineer? Not much. %Like Cobol and the 8088, there are sound commercial reasons why %Fortran is important, and why it's going to take a while to fade %away. To paraphrase Einstein, when people who're in Graduate %school today are in their 40s and 50s, there will be very little %Fortran in the world. Because top-notch people in the professional %world today got their Ph. D.s in the middle ages, they'll %definitely use Fortran. Why bother arguing about it?? The comparison of FORTRAN to COBOL and the 8088 microprocessor, along with the rest of Ajay's remarks, are beneath the dignity of a rational reply. Instead, I proffer the epithet deemed appropriate for such tirades: /\ / \ /\ /\ /\ Flame Off, Buddy!!!!! | \/ \ / \/ \ | \ / \ \ \/ /\ /\ | | /\ / \/ | | \ / \ | / | \ \ | \ / / \ \ / \ / / ______________________________________ / /\ | --------________ ------ |||| | |||| | -------_______ |||| | ------- |||| \______________________________________\/ It's obvious that you're trying to make many people here angry with your insulting remarks. If you want to fight, get off the net and join the Army. I should probably say that so long as there are bit-jockeys around who want to futz around with structures and unions, and who are under the mistaken impression that everybody who programs a computer should actually _care,_ we will have folks like Ajay trying to tell us how to do our science. Now, where I come from, we have a name for folks who like to tell others how to do their business, and that's "Busybody." (Actually, there is _another_ name, but I wouldn't want to include it in the network traffic.) C ========================================================================== C === This subroutine will write a signature at the end of a posting. Subroutine Signature Write (*, 101) 101 Format (1H1, 'Doctor FORTRAN', /, ' Master of the Realm', /, 1 ' Reply: jav8106@ritvax.isc.rit.edu') Return End
rh@smds.UUCP (Richard Harter) (12/06/90)
In article <18138@hydra.gatech.EDU>, gt4512c@prism.gatech.EDU (BRADBERRY,JOHN L) writes: > I find that the religious wars are fought largely because not > enough people on BOTH sides of the issuse have invested enough > time and effort LEARNING about the language. C jocks who have > written 250K+ lines in FORTRAN are the exception just as FORTRAN > jocks who have written 250K+ lines in C! Well I can speak as one who has done pretty close to both -- I estimate that I have suffered through about 300K lines of Fortran, 200K lines of C, and 100K lines of PL/I plus the usual miscellaneous languages. My observation is this -- both languages suffer from bloat and both offer too many opportunities for creating mystery bugs. I prefer C because it has the features to do the things that I need to do -- however C is an awful language. All you have to do is read comp.lang.c and observe the language lawyers explaining the fine points of the language to bewildered novices and you will begin to understand what I mean. C is ugly and baroque; Fortran is unspeakable. PL/I combines the failings of Fortran and Cobol and the virtues of neither. Color me a grumpy old fart. :-) -- Richard Harter, Software Maintenance and Development Systems, Inc. Net address: jjmhome!smds!rh Phone: 508-369-7398 US Mail: SMDS Inc., PO Box 555, Concord MA 01742 This sentence no verb. This sentence short. This signature done.