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?"
Are there any cheap but quality tutorial for Fortran? O'Reilly has no contemporary introduction to the language and their last book on Fortran, Migrating to Fortran 90 , came out nearly two decades ago.
I work at a university research lab and Fortran is still very much present. If nothing else, students need to be able to work with legacy code. I agree, however, that new projects should make use of more modern languages. Special consideration should be given to functional programming which naturally fits many science problems and is easily parallelizable due to its "no side effects" philosophy.
Use both. I used Fortran to create some python modules at my last job, and it was dead easy. Take a look at this.
but for math geeks FORTRAN is probably the easiest language to get from pencil-n-paper to computer. Math functions in FORTRAN translate nicely from their paper counter parts. If you can do math and "show your work", or punch numbers in a calculator, you're 2/3 of the way to a FORTRAN command line program.
I don't think it's a useful first language anymore. Something like Python would be more useful "out of college". FORTRAN is really easy to pick up later anyway as it's "old fashioned" and line numbered based. I'd think the biggest problem teaching the class now would be getting students to take it seriously because it's a much older way of thinking about programs from our modern OOP languages.
I am a manager in a highly technical organization that relies on computer codes to do our job. In my experience, there isn't ENOUGH FORTRAN teaching in the college level. Maybe its location based, but most of our new-hires (we get most from the northeast, but still get a noticeable amount from as far away as University of Washington, Univ of Hawaii, and USC) actually are NOT taught FORTRAN and instead are taught something object-oriented, typically C++ or Java. I know for a fact that Penn State suggests C++ for all undergrad engineers (FORTRAN is offered though - the classes hold less than 50% total students than does the C++ course). In my organization we also have a 'double-hump' age distribution: lots of people ready to retire (or could have retired 5 years ago...) and lots of people who are within 5 years of their first day on the job. This creates a problem of knowledge management; our new guys need to know the details of the FORTRAN code they are using every day to the extent that our ready-to-retire guys know it, and fast. If they are not taught FORTRAN, this creates an even larger learning curve for them which isn't desirable. So one option would be to 'rewrite the code for the future generation'.. We definitely do not have the resources to rewrite our workhorse codes that have been in use and development since the 70s. I don't know if an organization as large as Microsoft could rewrite Windows in a new language. Also, we can't retire our old codes because they are still actively needed to respond to emergent issues (it is easier to maintain the codes than it is to make a new model to be inputted into a new code). So, our hands are tied (mine specifically!) and my organization actually needs MORE FORTRAN programmers coming from the university just to maintain the status quo.
Indeed, even the creator of Fortran said "actually, that was a shit idea, we should all ignore it and use functional programming instead" in this paper.
but for math geeks FORTRAN is probably the easiest language to get from pencil-n-paper to computer. Math functions in FORTRAN translate nicely from their paper counter parts. If you can do math and "show your work", or punch numbers in a calculator, you're 2/3 of the way to a FORTRAN command line program.
Yes, but with a good functional language like Haskell, you're 9/10 of the way there, not 2/3.
FYI, numpy is just a wrapper around C and fortan based modules
So you get best of both worlds, I think Python is a better introductory programming language.
You speak London? I speak London very best.
I absolutely agree. With a background in c++, learning python (my new department's introductory language) was cake, but I'm watching the people who learned python first struggle to go beyond it. They're even more hindered by the fact that they keep thinking, "But python was so easy..."
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
A more interesting questions is "Why are other programming languages so hard? And is the difficulty justified by the additional power?" Bonus question: Is it *necessary* that a language (cough, cough, C++) be an ergonomic disaster to be powerful?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The Elders feel that if they had to go through it, so do the young'uns gol durn it!
Seriously, though - as far as I know, Fortran has always been the language of those humonguous numerical models because of its optimizations with regard to array handling. I think it makes perfect sense as a first (or second) language for science majors. However I imagine the person asking this question is likely one of the young'uns being forced to learn it; and that person doesn't really have the perspective as to *why* this is so. After all, he's been hacking around in C and Python for years - they're in his comfort zone and have been good enough for the sorts of things he's been dealing with.
#DeleteChrome
I'm a scientist who does the bulk of his programming in Python. Numpy (the numerical package for Python) runs at only a 30% overhead over C. When that's not fast enough, I drop into C/C++ for bottlenecks and wrap that back into Python (using the Python C API more often than swig/boost). When there's a great Fortran library that's fast and battle tested, I wrap that into Python using F2Py--and I don't even know that much Fortran.
Just like it's good to know more than one spoken language, it's good to know more than one programming language. It's a mistake to think one programming language fits all needs. That said, it can also be helpful to know one really well, and others enough to convert them into your primary language. For me, Python fills that role very adequately, and I would highly recommend it be a part (read: part) of the undergraduate programming curriculum.
Trust me, while you may wish you were learning how to write applications in the latest pop language during undergrad, the rest of the world wishes you had been taught computer language theory, set theory, data analysis by inference, proper documentation of your code, the 'non-coding' aspects of any number of different SDLC lifecycles, complete code coverage testing approaches, the interaction between software and the machine (where the machine is the network of machines, and the rest of the software running on those machines) and critical thought / problem solving during your undergrad years.
Your disdain for COBOL, FORTRAN, and Pascal show exactly why it's a bad idea to teach a single 'current' language and spend four years focusing on all the APIs and subtle language quirks - languages come and go. Entire platforms come and go. And yet the same people adapt over time (if they are good) and continue to implement strong software engineering principles in whatever comes along to replace those obsolete technologies.
Perhaps during those classes you weren't supposed to be focusing on the medium (the language) and rather be focusing on the lesson (data structures, analysis of algorithms, queue theory, set theory, or the one that has caused the world the most problems - handling every input that could possibly be handed to a routine.)
All of the above can be taught in any language, including one made up by the professor (RIP Edgar Dykstra.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
If it were a computer science course then I'd say that something in the Lisp family, something in the OCAML or Haskell family, and somthing from the Prolog family. I agree that they're likely to encounter static typing at some point but this isn't a computer science course so it shouldn't try to teach everything, and static typing shouldn't come as too much of a shock. Heck, my first language was FOCAL, and I managed to learn to cope with it.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Well, I'll tell you like my former VB teacher told me, funnily enough after some kid tried to steal my code and pass it off as his own. After Mike(my teacher) got done laughing his ass off he told the kid "BTW you are getting an F for stealing from Kevin". "How do you know that he didn't steal it from me?" Again after Mike got done laughing his ass off he projected the code onto the board and said to the class "Do you notice anything a little odd about this code?" And one said "It has numbers in front of all the lines...and what is a GOTO?"
And Mike said "How old are you Shawn?" and after the kid said 19 he said "And THAT class is why I know Shawn stole this code from Kevin. He turned to me and said "You're what? 35?" and when I confirmed he said "You see class, in the days before PCs became standard with pretty desktops like you have now, all the machines ran BASIC. The numbering and the use of GOTO to call a sub is a classic tell that the person who wrote this cut his teeth on one of the old BASIC computers." He tilted his head and said "Commodore or Atari?" and I sat there with my mouth gaping and said "Commodore VIC20. How did you know that?" he said "Because your code is classic Commodore and Atari style. Very efficient but as subtle as a chainsaw."
After some of the kids started coping pieces of my code and trying to use GOTO and crashing all over the place Mike explained it to me like this-"To an old greybeard like you or me, that actually understands what the code is doing a GOTO can be a quick and efficient way to get something done quick. Subtle as a chainsaw, but it gets the job done. But you give it to these kids, that don't really understand what they are trying to accomplish or understand how the codes works in the machine? It is like handing a monkey a sledgehammer and letting him loose in a room full of bombs. He is gonna blow something up, the only question is when."
So if you want to know why teachers like Mike would cringe when they saw a GOTO, it is because it works fine IF you know what you are doing and how the code will be processed. But with so many learning code the VS way, with everything drag and drop, for many of those GOTO will simply blow up in their faces. Better just to not let them know it exists in the first place.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.