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?"
Would a Taco suck a cock if a Taco could fuck a cock?
Fortran holds no place today. Assembly level knowledge is key to being a brilliant mofo like me.
because Python is interpreted and FORTRAN is compiled. And honestly, lets admit it, the whole object oriented thing has pretty much failed and its time to pack it up and get procedural again.
This is my sig.
they were using a mathematical library that would solve partial differential equations, by presenting the user with the actual mathematical formulae to them.
Uh, just a point of note, I believe my TI-89 from high school in 1999 solves partial differential equations. Hell, I think Mathematica could do this when I used it in college in 2003.
these kinds of libraries are staggeringly complex to write, and they have been empirically proven over decades of use to actually work.
An operating system is staggeringly complex to write yet a single man can write one. A very special man but a man nonetheless. Your mentality is fatalistic.
to start again from scratch with such libraries would require man-centuries or possibly man-millenia of development effort to reproduce and debug, regardless of the programming language.
If that's the case, it would be my inkling to tackle this problem from a new angle and I think many people already have and continue to do that.
so it doesn't matter what people in the slashdot community think: for engineers to use anything but these tried-and-tested engineering libraries, that happen to be written in fortran, would just be genuinely stupid of them.
How did we ever make progress with people like you around?
My work here is dung.
briilIant plan Dying' crowd -
Python is the *last* language you should learn.
And only if you absolutely must use it.
I wouldn't describe it as "pudding" though. That's too tasty.
Then stop hiring teenagers.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
they have absolutely no desire to go back twiddling fucking parenthesis on hundreds of millions of lines of code just because some guy named guido read his tea leaves one morning and decided parenthesis are important in the 'print' function.
all of the tens of thousands of 'python example codes' now on the web will NOT FUCKING WORK OUT OF THE BOX.. even HELLO WORLD WILL NOT EVEN WORK ANYMORE.
do you think scientists are going to put up with this shit? they are trying to solve cancer, and you tell them they need to spend several hours, days, weeks, putting parenthesis around print statements. what the fuck is wrong with you?
FORTRAN crap from 40 years ago will STILL FUCKING COMPILE AND RUN.
Python? python 4.0, guido will probably decide that fucking whitespace has to be tabs, commas have to be semi colons, and print should be called 'state'. fuck computer nerds to hell.
I have a suggestion. Since FORTRAN programs are everywhere, how about the Python advocates form a large group of programmers to convert every little purpose specific program from FORTRAN (and BASIC and COBOL and Pascal) to Python. Then the users that use FORTRAN programs because they are too unsophisticated to write and debug any program, will use the environment you want them to.
It would make my life easier as a program user. I am too old to write programs anymore. I wrote dozens.
And Visual Basic should be taken out, shot, drowned, burnt and sterilized for all it's abilities to make things unsafe and bug-ridden.
I find it ironic how there's lot of vitriol directed at the "unsafety" of VB (which is definitely quite real), while it still has a long way to go to reach Perl in that department.