Slashdot Mirror
Should Undergraduates Be Taught Fortran?
Mike Croucher writes "Despite the fact that it is over 40 years old, Fortran is still taught at many Universities to students of Physics, Chemistry, Engineering and more as their first ever formal introduction to programming. According to this article that shouldn't be happening anymore, since there are much better alternatives, such as Python, that would serve a physical science undergraduate much better. There may come a time in some researchers' lives where they need Fortran, but this time isn't in 'programming for chemists 101.' What do people in the Slashdot community think?"
Fortran is still one of the best, fastest, most optimized tools for number crunching. It's also very easy to write simple programs in it. No way I'd use Python for serious large data set numerical calculations.
Right. Teach COBOL instead!
Job security well into the next millenium!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's called Scheme.
Meta will eat itself
Are you serious? Python?
I am somewhat a Python fan boy. I love it. Its freaking wonderful for prototyping and really has a great, natural flow that reminds me a lot of pseudocode I might just invent on a napkin. Great language. But its also a factor of 30 times slower than a compiled language like C.
(http://www.osnews.com/story/5602/Nine_Language_Performance_Round-up_Benchmarking_Math_File_I_O/page3/)*
And Fortran is able to do optimizations (due to differences in the language for evaluation of expressions) that C is unable to do. This has to do with guarantees of ordering that Fortran does not give that C does. My point is that Fortran is even faster than C. Why do you think its still around?
The physical sciences aren't using a fast language because they are bored, or obsessed with speed for the hell of it. They use them because the problems they solve are typically deep into polynomial space, like O(n^3) or O(n^4). Having something 30 times faster means they can run 30 simulations instead of just 1. It makes a big difference to them.
I think the author of this article has lost some of this perspective.
That said, what this article should have tackled is, what do we want to teach engineering students about computer science? Right now, they take a class that teaches them C++, Java, Python, or whatever. They get some procedural programming skills with maybe a little tiny bit of object-oriented stuff (without really covering OO fundamentals IMHO, which are a more advanced topic) and they are thrown into a world where they are writing code in C for embedded controllers or Fortran for computational codes. As a result, there is a huge body of code out there written by people who know how to get the job done, but don't exactly write code that is very maintainable. They relearn the lessons of CS he hard way over 10-20-30-40(?) years of experience. Are we really giving these young students (who are not CS majors) what they need? What kind of curriculum would be ideal for someone who is going to end up writing code for something like a robot control system in C?
* I didn't really look too closely at this particular source, but I've seen numerous benchmarks all saying the same thing. If you want a surprise, go look at how LISP stacks up compared to C. It is better than you think.
IMO universities should be teaching core principles and methods, not attempting to impart up-to-date job skills.
If you are going to teach FORTRAN because it's of use in the real world, then why stop there? Why not also (god forbid) teach .NET. JavaScript, C#, etc. May as well teach them Excel macros and how to interact with Microsoft Clippy while you're at it.
No!
Teaching programming should be done in a langauge that imparts the principles easily and teaches good habits. You could do a lot worse than Pascal which was often used in this role, or maybe today just C++. I'd argue against Java and scripting languages as the core language since they are too high level to learn all the basics. You could throw in Perl, Python or any modern scripting langauge as a secondary, and for a Computer Science (vs. Physics, Engineering, etc) it's appropriate to teach a couple of other styles of programming - e.g. assembler, and functional programming.
God forbid, don't teach em python first. Learn assembly, c++, ML, fortran even fucking visual basic. You can't learn python first, it's like eating the pudding before the salad. Python is the *last* language you should learn.
Yes, I'm serious.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Fortran hasn't had those limitations for decades - Fortran 90 and later are ideal languages for expressing mathematical algorithms and crunching numbers
Fortran hasn't had those limitations for decades - Fortran 90 and later are ideal languages for expressing mathematical algorithms and crunching numbers. The handling of arrays, matrices are just what they should be.
I wouldn't use Fortran as a general purpose language - having used Python for more 10 years I shudder at using Fortran for string handling, databases, user interfaces and more - but as a tool for expressing math it's the best, and also the most widely used. The alternative would be matlab (much of the syntax isn't that different).
This was clearly written by someone who doesn't actually do any scientific computing.
As hard as it may be for some CS-types (myself included) to believe, Fortran is still the language for scientific computing. I've worked at flight simulation companies for two different companies (and 5 different groups) for the last 15 years. The math required to simulate a flying aircraft in realtime is ungodly hairy. It also has to get done fast. We typically have 50 or so different simulation models (plus all the I/O) that have to run to completion 60 times a second. That's about 17ms, or 8ms if we want %50 spare. In addition, for a realtime app like a simulatior it needs to take the same time to execute every time (no runtime dynamic allocations, GC, etc.) or things "jitter".
Everywhere I've worked, with the exception of Ada mandated jobs, had this code done in Fortran. Yes that includes today. We are today writing new Fortran, and we are not alone. When we request models from the aircract manufacturers, they come in Fortran (or occasionally Ada). Fortran is still, and quite possibly always will be, the language for Scientific Computing.
Suggesting non-CS math and science students learn some other programming language instead is just wrong. Further suggesting that it should be the author's favorite hip new interpreted languge is just laughable.
The idea of programming as a semiskilled task, practiced by people with a few months' training, is dangerous. We wouldn't tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated. We don't have as an aim that architecture (of buildings) and engineering (of bridges and trains) should become more accessible to people with progressively less training. Indeed, one serious problem is that currently, too many software developers are undereducated and undertrained.
Obviously, we don't want our tools--including our programming languages--to be more complex than necessary. But one aim should be to make tools that will serve skilled professionals--not to lower the level of expressiveness to serve people who can hardly understand the problems, let alone express solutions. We can and do build tools that make simple tasks simple for more people, but let's not let most people loose on the infrastructure of our technical civilization or force the professionals to use only tools designed for amateurs.
- Bjarne S.
No sig today...
It's definitely not a language for amateurs in the sense of people who like to fiddle with the system, are interested in how the compiler works, or who just want to make gee-whizz web mashups. It's a language for people who don't care a rat's *ss about computers or programming, but who need to get their calculations done without wasting time on fiddling with pointers and who need reliable answers without being bitten by silent array-boundary overflows to boot. So Slashdot might not be the best place to ask for an opinion.
Besides, most of today's numerical libraries (BLAS, LAPACK, ATLAS, EISPACK, FFT) are written in Fortran. If you want to use them, you could do worse than learn Fortran.
True, it's not a language you'd want to do sophisticated datastructures in, or tree-searches or text-processing or payroll accounting or database manipulation. But especially chemists (and to a lesser extent physicists) have more call for numerical software than they have for non-numerical software.
So no. It's not at all ridiculous to teach Fortran as a first programming language to non-computer-science students. Alongside Matlab (or Octave or Scilab) it will do fine for chemists.
But the original point of the article is about teaching people who are mathematicians (not programmers) FORTRAN or a newer language such as Python. These aren't people who, most probably, won't be coding for a living. Although knowing how a code a little will come in handy. To that extent it's more like the fact that most homeowner own a hammer and know how to use it, but don't have a need to buy a nail gun and learn how to use that. (admittedly buying a nail gun for a homeowner is really about how much FUN it is to have a nail gun handy all the time!)
On a side note : How many of those roofers and framers learned to use a nail gun before a hammer?
Most roofers and framers learned to use a nail gun first, and many, if not most, will never learn to use a hammer at any level that could be called proficient in the real-world "production" environment of housebuilding. Remember, we're talking mastery of the tools at a level that allows "efficiency". That's a plateau that is far lower for the nail gun.
Same goes for programming skills. Python, for example, is far easier to master at that level (efficient production) than FORTRAN, for most tasks. Yes, there are those tasks for which FORTRAN is the right tool for the job (number crunching), but such a case is a very rare exception. So if "knowing how to code a little" is a good thing, spending x hours of the undergraduate's time teaching him a more utilitarian tool is the better expenditure of time, is it not? And BTW, let's dispense with the "but it doesn't teach good programming practice". We're not talking about BASIC here. There are a number of candidates that would fit the bill. Hell, I'd suggest that PERL is a far better choice than FORTRAN.
God forbid, don't teach em python first. Learn assembly, c++, ML, fortran
This seems to me like saying you should learn to drive an F1 car, or a Model T, before being allowed anything with an automatic gearbox.
I would say driving a car is like running a program. Designing or repairing a car is a much better analogy. And in that case, learning the old designs, and the physics they used is much better than "run this diagnostic tool; replace factory-made black-box widget". Learning assembly or C forces a person to recognize the limits of the machine (and thus the limits of interpreted languages).
Fortran has it's place, even though it's a bit of a fringe language today.
It has evolved since Fortran 77, and is better. It's also one of the languages where it doesn't require the programmer to have a detailed knowledge about how to parallelize a problem since later versions has those features built in. The programmer just have to be aware that it can be parallelized, but not waste time on the details about how to do it. Unfortunately GNU Fortran doesn't support this yet (unless it has been enabled lately).
Python is certainly not an alternative - unless you want to have a replacement for Basic.
Education shall primarily be done in type-safe languages that forces the developers to learn the importance of type safety. Way too many bugs have been created through history that are related to operations that aren't type-safe. Ada is one language that is really strict. Java is acceptable. C# is not acceptable since it has some unsafe parts when it comes to data typing.
And Visual Basic should be taken out, shot, drowned, burnt and sterilized for all it's abilities to make things unsafe and bug-ridden.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Evidently, you don't go out that much. People use interpreted languages in science all the time. At least I do. Where I sit, there is quite a bit of spare capacity waiting. When I try to figure something out it is way more reasonable to write a program in three-four hours and have it run overnight than to write it in two days and have it run in (say) thirty minutes.
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
The idea of programming as a semiskilled task, practiced by people with a few months' training, is dangerous. We wouldn't tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated.
Not at all. Most homeowners do a lot more around the house with a lot less training, whether opening up the garbage disposal or trying to manage their retirement accoutns. The goal of these classes--especially for scientists--is the equivalent: Not to get people ready for programming a bug-free third party app; it's so they don't have to sit on their hands waiting for someone else to "build tools" to solve a perfectly manageable, one-off program that will let them move their research forward.
There may be things where there's a nice pre-built commercial or open source app; there will also be problems where there's a need for paid consultants. But there's a lot of ground in the middle, especially in specialized fields.
A program language should be taught on the basis that it teaches the student programming and not that it jigsaws them into the world of business. I student that can transcend languages is likely to be a better programmer anyways, as they'll have more tools and models with which to get a task done.
I would agree with this in theory, however in practice it doesn't create a programmer who can transcend languages. In fact, they generally become very tied to specific language paradigms or capabilities. For instance, most universities seem to have selected Java as the language for CS. The problem here is that when they get into the "real world" they can't find a job doing anything but java. Why? Because they have no clue what a pointer is or how to use it. Most CS and related programs are hurting our students simply because the instructors don't want to teach about certain things, or because they or the students think it's just too hard. Most people I work with don't really understand how programming really works. I once had a co-worker who had been programming for 20 years, but had no idea that the CPU had registers, what they were for, or how they would be used. That's just sad.
My favorite class with respect to this was assembly. It was fairly easy to pick up and taught you how the computer interpreted commands at a relatively low level.
You (and I) are becoming something of a rarity now days, most people I work with know absolutely nothing about assembly. :-(
Python? As an intro language? And I thought people were misguided teaching Java as the first (and often only) language.
Second, while some of these scientific programs can run overnight, a lot of them will take a day or more to run, even when compiled and on a super or parallel computer. I don't know of any highly optimized Python compilers for big metal. Fortran is still the number one language for performance computing.
Third, there seriously needs to be major scientific libraries pre-existing for the language to be useful. An added benefit is being able to support more than one floating point number format.
Finally, the number one most important reason that Fortran is used in the sciences, is because everyone else uses it in the field. Seriously, what good is Python if all your prof's and advisor's and boss's programs that you need to maintain are in Fortran 66? It's faster to learn Fortran than to port it all. This is part of the "dusty deck" problem, where decades old libraries still have to be used and supported. This applies to many languages - many languages are popular precisely because they are popular, not because of inherent elegance or suitability.
In the sciences, the students are not being taught programming for the sake of programming, and they're not even being taught to write good programs necessarily. They're being taught to program as a mere tool for the important stuff being taught. Some classes may not even care what language you use, as long as you can read and understand the sample programs and the math library is correct.
Being in the sciences and not knowing Fortran will be a drawback. In some areas it may not be as big a drawback, but it will be there. This is like trying to do embedded systems without knowing C.