arenberg@trwrb.UUCP (Jeff Arenberg) (04/28/88)
I've been following the C vs Fortran debate for sometime now with a mixed feeling of humor and sadness. I think that most of the people who say one is so much better than the other, or who try to point out features that one has but is lacking in the other are really missing the point. I personally prefer C because of the way it is written. I can think the problem through better. But this is just a personal preference. I'm reasonably sure that every program I've ever written in C (several hundred) would have been written in Fortran also. The real problem are the hard-liners who aren't flexible enough to be able to switch back and forth as necessary. I'm having a very difficult time at work convincing those who pay my salary, that it's OK to write code in C. They are engineers who learned Fortran and nothing else. My section head made the comment during one of our debates that, "If its not written in uppercase, I just can't read it". This is not a problem with his eyesight, but with his mentality. There are a lot of good computer languages available (C, Fortran, Pascal, Algol and many more) and anyone who is serious about programming should be able to work in any of them. Regretably, most engineers, moreover most of the people writing any kind of software, are not serious programmers. I think the only way to rectify this unfortunate situation, is to require that computer language classes teach more the one at a time. Say, showing examples of code in atleast three different languages for every problem. I seriously doubt this will every happen, but I can always hope. In the meantime, I and all the other multi-lingual programmers must do our best to cope with the stubborn and ignorant majority. Jeff Arenberg ------------------------------------------------------------ UUCP : ( ucbvax, ihnp4, uscvax ) !trwrb!trwcsed!arenberg ARPA : jarenberg@ecla.usc.edu GEnie: shifty ------------------------------------------------------------