If your primary job is engineering and not programming, and you're getting the job done in FORTRAN, then by all means stick with FORTRAN.
If on the other hand, you are building software systems from scratch that will need to be maintained over time and have components that might need to be reused then maybe OO is the way to go.
In any event, it is good that you are exploring OO because even if you don't use all the techniques explicitly, you are probably picking up some good design ideas through osmosis.
I'm sorry to see that Artificial Intelligence NV is having troubles. My computer science dissertation research at the LSU Department of Computer Science involves building a computer model of human language acquisition, and I feel that the more working in this area, the better.
For those of you that might be interested, I just launched a new site dedicated to models of human language acquisition. Over time I hope to provide a repository of relevant news on researchers, conferences, papers, and books from fields including A/I, computational linguistics, developmental psychology, machine learning, and cognitive science.
I will also use the site to share information about my own work. Like HAL, my model learns (and "learn" should always be taken with a grain of salt) from the bottom-up, but the words it acquires are grounded in visual perception. The basic idea is to resolve nouns to objects and verbs to actions/relationships in short spatial-motion videos. My work is based on work by Jeffrey Mark Siskind, David Bailey, Jan Norris, and Katherine Nelson.
Upon completion of my dissertation, I hope to release some or all of the Java code for my model on the site.
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This is still the most creative use of a computer case that I've seen. Mmmmmm.... beer.
The problem with AOL buying RedHat is that the user bases couldn't be more oppposite! This little story is a prime example of what I'm talking about.
If your primary job is engineering and not programming, and you're getting the job done in FORTRAN, then by all means stick with FORTRAN. If on the other hand, you are building software systems from scratch that will need to be maintained over time and have components that might need to be reused then maybe OO is the way to go. In any event, it is good that you are exploring OO because even if you don't use all the techniques explicitly, you are probably picking up some good design ideas through osmosis.
For those of you that might be interested, I just launched a new site dedicated to models of human language acquisition. Over time I hope to provide a repository of relevant news on researchers, conferences, papers, and books from fields including A/I, computational linguistics, developmental psychology, machine learning, and cognitive science.
I will also use the site to share information about my own work. Like HAL, my model learns (and "learn" should always be taken with a grain of salt) from the bottom-up, but the words it acquires are grounded in visual perception. The basic idea is to resolve nouns to objects and verbs to actions/relationships in short spatial-motion videos. My work is based on work by Jeffrey Mark Siskind, David Bailey, Jan Norris, and Katherine Nelson.
Upon completion of my dissertation, I hope to release some or all of the Java code for my model on the site.