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.
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/
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.
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).
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. :-(