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?"
But only if they have to do it on punch cards, like I did. Give each student a can of WD40 to keep the machines working smoothly, too.
--No one-- should be taught FORTRAN. Ever...
*sobs in fetal position*
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.
i spoke to someone studying engineering in 1990 who was being taught fortran. they were using a mathematical library that would solve partial differential equations, by presenting the user with the actual mathematical formulae to them.
these kinds of libraries are staggeringly complex to write, and they have been empirically proven over decades of use to actually work.
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.
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.
If all you need is to crunch numbers, Fortran is a good choice even today.
It might not be the best language to introduce someone to computer science, but it is very powerful for anything that has to do with matrix operations.
A few years ago in a physics graduate course we had a simulation project which left the choice of language to the student.
We compared performance between implementations in C C++ and Fortran.
Fortran was consistently faster by a big margin.
It's also very easy to learn.
That said, I do most of my coding in C.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
google Fortran tutorial download
How new does the book need to be for the language standard when it hasn't changed much in 2 decades? It's a simple, easy to use tool for serious engineering.
Yes, everything should be written in a fresh, clean language.
I nominate VBScript.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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.
I did my graduate studies in a university electromagnetics lab. Two of the professors main research area was FEA. By default, we still ended up learning some even if it wasn't our research area. Most the students were pro Matlab, where as the professors were pro Fortran. As a result, if you were doing FEA for your research, you were learning fortran. If you are doing small simulations, then go ahead and use Matlab, since it will be easier to code and debug. Once you start creating 3D meshes, the number of unknowns becomes huge. At that point a compiled language is a better choice. At least fortran has complex numbers native to the language, so its implementation is a bit more elegant than say C/C++.
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.
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).
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Megalith programmers from 4000 years ago are being dredged up from peat bogs and pressed into service to get the henges updated to handle the turnover in the date. "It could be worse," said one. "I could still be programming COBOL."
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Actually, Fortran has changed quite a bit in the last two decades. The Fortran 90, Fortran 95, and Fortran 2003 standards have come out during that time. They added quite a number of major features, such as free-form source code, recursive procedures, operator overloading, dynamic memory allocation, and object-oriented programming. The Fortran of 2009 is not like the Fortran of 1989 at all.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
I'm an engineer with a large aerospace firm. All our major programs are in Fortran and have to be used, modified, and maintained. I remember a few years ago we hired a new grad from MIT; she had studied Basic, Pascal, and C; so of course we had to teach her Fortran so she could do her work. The engineering world is heavily dependant upon Fortran, and to not know it puts you at a huge disadvantage.
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.
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.
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.
I think you are mistaken regarding what most undergraduate science students actually do (they are not maintaining/upgrading old fortran libraries). Most of the high performance capability that undergrads need involves matrix computations, FFTs, convolution, etc., all of which are included in the python numpy/Numeric module (which is a wrapper around fortran libraries, so they're just as efficient). And since they'll likely spend as much time analyzing data as producing it, python + numpy + matplotlib is a perfectly suitable solution.
I'm not suggesting that fortran isn't of value to some scientists in some situations but many science students will never have to touch fortran code unless they're forced to take a class that teaches it. As you said: "They're being taught to program as a mere tool for the important stuff being taught." Which is why it makes sense that their intro language is one that is easy to learn, supports multiple programming paradigms, has efficient numerical libraries, has easy-to-use visualization tools, an interactive interpreter, and can be used as a general purpose programming language. And while I personally prefer python for a high level language, there are others that could serve the same purpose.