Thanks! You have nailed the silly arguments of the anti-Microsoft zealots that infest Slashdot. Apple bundles lots of stuff into OS X, but somehow it's a crime when Microsoft does it. Rubbish.
"This is simply not a problem most mathematicians, phyicists or chemists have. I've never said, "Damnit, why doesn't the FORTRAN code for this thing look more like mathematics!?" Neither has anyone I know."
Many equations that you want to code involve arrays, and in Fortran 90 and later versions one can often write a single line of code such as
xsum = sum(x,x>0.0)
instead of
xsum = 0.0 do i=1,n
if (x(i) > 0.0) xsum = xsum + x(i) end do
Fortran 90/95 code does look more like math than its predecessors, and I think that's an advantage.
(1) One easy mistake to make with spreadsheets is to use an incorrect range of cells (maybe the range was correct in a previous version). For example, a cell computing total profit may have the formula
"=sum(a1:a100)"
which works until transactions spill beyond cell a100. A properly written program in C++/Java/whatever would be written to work for any reasonable number of transactions.
(2) To speed up parts of a spreadsheet one sometimes turns calculations off. Forgetting to turn them on at the right time can cause subtle errors.
(3) Excel LINEST (linear regression) outputs the regression coefficients in the REVERSE order of the columns. This insane decision trips up many users. Does the spreadsheet in OpenOffice get this right?
(4) The row and column limits cause people to break up their data to fit into worksheets, which is awkward and error-prone.
(5) A common defect of spreadsheets I see is that the someone doesn't know or doesn't use VBA, and instead constructs indecipherable formulas.
(6) Big spreadsheets tend to get unstable and crash mysteriously, in ways that are difficult to debug.
(7) Spreadsheets tend to be copied and modified many times, leading to much duplication of any VBA code contained inside. When using Python, for example, my code is in a directory, and I don't duplicate code in order to reuse it.
Probably some of the problems above can be avoided by using "best practices" with Excel, such as creating Excel add-ins, but my colleagues and I often don't. They are not programmers and do not seem to realize that there are problems with how they use spreadsheets.
People can use stretch spreadsheets beyond their limits, but they are very useful for small and medium-size problems.
I prefer Python's indentation to the curly braces of C/C++/Java, but my favorite is to have a keyword end the block, as in Fortran or Visual Basic, for example
if (test) then
something endif
Without semicolons and braces littering the code, I think Fortran 90 and later versions have a cleaner syntax than the curly brace languages.
I use implicit none in all Fortran code, but I don't think that "large, serious projects" in Python should require variable declarations in all cases, even if Python had that feature. An advantage of Python's duck typing is that generic programming is simple. As a trivial example, a function such as
def twice(x):
return 2*x
will work for integers, floats, and Numarray arrays of integers and floats. Requiring x to be declared would needlessly limit the functionality of function 'twice'.
What I would like in Python is that ability to declare constants, similar to "const" in C++ or "parameter" in Fortran.
Btw Pyrex is a Python-based language with declarations.
One can buy "classic" books such as "Pride and Prejudice" used from Amazon (and other places) for $1-$2 plus the price of shipping. I prefer the book format to a computer printout, and I'm not sure that the cost of printing the book is smaller.
Maybe Gutenberg is better for searching or analyzing texts than reading them. Some novels have complicated plots. I wonder if computerized plot summaries generated by analyzing the text are possible? Sounds like a job for a Perlmonger:).
This post is nonsense. First of all, Fortran is not "dead" . There are about 10 Fortran 95 compilers, listed at http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Language s/Fortran/Compilers/ , and compilers are adding features from the recently approved Fortran 2003 standard. Two reasons Fortran did lose much market share were (1) the slow arrival of the Fortran 90 standard, which added dynamic memory allocation, a full set of control structures, user-defined types and free source form, and which otherwise remedied the defects of Fortran 77. (2) the lack of a free Fortran 90 compiler.
G95 does implement practically all of Fortran 95, including the features listed in (1), and gfortran is progressing towards that goal. It is obscene to accuse the volunteers of g95 and gfortran of "killing Fortran".
g95 is more mature than gfortran
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 2, Informative
At present, there are numerous features of Fortran 95 that gfortran (the gcc Fortran 95 compiler) does not handle correctly. G95 http://www.g95.org/, from which gfortran forked, is closer to being a full Fortran compiler. One can search the Usenet group comp.lang.fortran to confirm these statements.
If you just want a free Fortran 95 compiler use g95. Bugs reported to Andy Vaught are usually fixed quickly, and fresh Linux compiler binaries are posted almost daily. If you want to participate in the development of a Fortran 95 compiler, gfortran is more democratic.
Gates is wrong in thinking that "high schools must be redesigned to prepare every student for college". Many if not most people do not have the intelligence to do real college level work. You can manufacture as many "college graduates" as you want by lowering standards enough. U.S. high school students trail their peers in most other countries on standardized tests, but they go to college at higher rates. That does not make sense.
Teens who are not academically inclined should be encouraged to go to work, as explained by Thomas Sowell at http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell052201.asp/ . The current system is designed more to benefit teachers than students, because the teachers are much more organized through teachers' unions than parents are. Peter Brimelow discusses this in his recent book "The Worm in the Apple".
How could monetary damages be computed? For illegal use of a commercial product, the damages could be some multiple of the license fees that should have been paid, but GPL'ed software has no monetary cost.
I wonder how much "bite" the GPL has. Has any company ever been forced by a lawsuit to open-source software it distributed because it used GPL'ed code?
If a company does not buy the proper licenses for the commercial software it uses, it could held liable for damages in a civil suit. There is a clear "victim".
>I don't think you can claim "Fortran" is more >correct than "FORTRAN", or vice versa. The >standards people still say "FORTRAN". Then >again, it's a natural tendency to >say "Fortran", since it's not an acronym. Then >again, if IBM still cared about the trademark, >you'd get a letter from their lawyers every >time you did so.
The official spelling has been "Fortran" since the 1990 standard. I don't think either "Fortran" or "FORTRAN" is an IBM trademark.
>Could you give specifics, please? That post was >a bit too abstract to give any credence to. >What calculations? Why do these use less code >(and how do they compare to C++, with its use >of operators and templates?).
Fortran 90/95/2003 shines in its treatment of multidimensional arrays. It resembles Matlab, with the advantages (and disadvantages) of a compiled language. Here are some of its specific strengths:
(1) To dynamically allocate a 3D array the code is just
(2) The array can be passed to a function just as a scalar is, without needing to mess with pointers. Arrays know their own size, so the dimensions of the array need not be passed as function arguments.
(3) Most intrinsic functions of Fortran are elemental, so exponentiating array x is done with just
x = exp(x)
No need for a triple loop as in C++.
(4) There are fast, flexible array intrinsic functions. If x is a matrix, one can compute the sum of all elements, the sum of each column, and the sum of each row with just
y = sum(x) y = sum(x,dim=1) y = sum(x,dim=2)
(5) One can work with arbitrary array sections with notation such as x(1:n1:2,:n2-1).
(6) One can define elemental functions and subroutines that operate on a scalar or an array of any dimension, just as the intrinsic functions do.
(7) Arrays of user-defined-types are convenient to work with. For example, given a data type
type:: person
real:: age,weight end type person
One can declare
type(person):: players(10,20)
and then access the array of ages with just
players%age
In C/C++ one has built-in access only to the age of a single person with something like
players[0][0]%age
(8) Arrays can have a lower bound of 1 (the default) or any other integer. For many if not most calculations, 1-based indexing is more natural.
"The programming and resources involved in running a full-scale climate model is tremendous, as well as the peer-review required over years of academics using something like the UK Met Office model. The UK Met Office model is not "open source" -- it is an extremely large, complicated system (something like 500,000 lines of Fortran; two miles of continuous paper if printed out and laid end-to-end). The UK Met Office has been superb in allowing us to bring it over to run on a Windows platform and distribute to the world. They are certainly not getting any money out of it."
I think they ought to disclose what Fortran compiler and what options were used to create the Windows executables.
"The Unified Model was originally written in the Fortran 77 programming language with some low level routines written in C to aid portability. Now however, Fortran 90 is increasingly used to take advantage of its new features and to facilitate exchange of code between different international meteorological organizations. Some components of the Unified Model such as the observation processing system and the variational data assimilation system have been written entirely in Fortran 90."
Quoting the site http://www.infoaging.org/b-neuro-1-what.html , whose findings agree with other material I have read:
"Most studies show that, in general, cognitive abilities are the greatest when people are in their 30s and 40s. Cognitive abilities stay about the same until the late 50s or early 60s, at which point they begin to decline, but to only a small degree. The effects of cognitive changes are usually not noticed until the 70s and beyond."
Having a large market share does not by itself make one a monopolist. I don't consider Microsoft to be a monopoly, because no law forces you to use their OS. Probably the market share of Microsoft Windows will be lower 20 years from now than today -- because of COMPETITION from Linux, Mac OS X, and perhaps other OS's yet to be created.
Real monopolies are organizations like the U.S. Postal Service or the Canadian health care system, which by LAW are shielded from competition.
People CHOOSE to use Windows because it easy-to-use, inexpensive, and complemented by a huge amount of software.
Intel had a "monopoly" on computer chips, until AMD got its act together and produced something better with the Opteron.
I agree with you in supporting Microsoft's freedom to add things to their operating system. Most people don't want to fiddle with their computer adding various software programs. The more functionality Microsoft can incorporate in their OS, the better. An advantage for consumers in having more functionality in the OS is that if something does not work, Microsoft is more clearly to blame.
Why can Apple and the various Linux distributions add whatever they want to their OS's, but not Microsoft?
The Linux advocates who say they favor freedom and choice in computing, but at the same time want the government to cripple Microsoft, are quite inconsistent.
If this post is regarded as "insightful", I must say that the moderators need to learn some economics. Do you think that WalMart pays less than Goldman Sachs because the big shots at Goldman Sachs are kind and generous people?
If certain WalMart employees don't earn that much, it's because no other employer is bidding more for their skills. That's what their labor is worth on the free market. WalMart is a great benefactor of the lower and middle classes, because it expands their purchasing power.
If you think WalMart is mean, try starting a small business, hiring away WalMart employees at higher wages, and making a profit. THEN you have to right to bash WalMart. Talk is cheap.
Students who like math and want to learn how to program should consider learning Fortran. There is a free compiler called g95 -- see http://www.g95.org/ . A clean subset of Fortran 95 called F, especially useful for teaching, is available -- see http://www.fortran.com/F/index.html/ .
Yes, Fortran is an old language, and some people have written spaghetti code in it -- in what language have they not? But versions of Fortran since the 1990 standard have all the features needed to write clean, modularized code.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks! You have nailed the silly arguments of the anti-Microsoft zealots that infest Slashdot.
Apple bundles lots of stuff into OS X, but somehow it's a crime when Microsoft does it. Rubbish.
"This is simply not a problem most mathematicians, phyicists or chemists have. I've never said, "Damnit, why doesn't the FORTRAN code for this thing look more like mathematics!?" Neither has anyone I know."
Many equations that you want to code involve arrays, and in Fortran 90 and later versions one can often write a single line of code such as
xsum = sum(x,x>0.0)
instead of
xsum = 0.0
do i=1,n
if (x(i) > 0.0) xsum = xsum + x(i)
end do
Fortran 90/95 code does look more like math than its predecessors, and I think that's an advantage.
Edward Tufte wrote a small book "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp making the same point as you about PowerPoint.
(1) One easy mistake to make with spreadsheets is to use an incorrect range of cells (maybe the range was correct in a previous version). For example, a cell computing total profit may have the formula
"=sum(a1:a100)"
which works until transactions spill beyond cell a100. A properly written program in C++/Java/whatever would be written to work for any reasonable number of transactions.
(2) To speed up parts of a spreadsheet one sometimes turns calculations off. Forgetting to turn them on at the right time can cause subtle errors.
(3) Excel LINEST (linear regression) outputs the regression coefficients in the REVERSE order of the columns. This insane decision trips up many users. Does the spreadsheet in OpenOffice get this right?
(4) The row and column limits cause people to break up their data to fit into worksheets, which is awkward and error-prone.
(5) A common defect of spreadsheets I see is that the someone doesn't know or doesn't use VBA, and instead constructs indecipherable formulas.
(6) Big spreadsheets tend to get unstable and crash mysteriously, in ways that are difficult to debug.
(7) Spreadsheets tend to be copied and modified many times, leading to much duplication of any VBA code contained inside. When using Python, for example, my code is in a directory, and I don't duplicate code in order to reuse it.
Probably some of the problems above can be avoided by using "best practices" with Excel, such as creating Excel add-ins, but my colleagues and I often don't. They are not programmers and do not seem to realize that there are problems with how they use spreadsheets.
People can use stretch spreadsheets beyond their limits, but they are very useful for small and medium-size problems.
The government should provide a service only if
(1) the private sector cannot do it
(2) the service is essential
Broadband internet access fits neither criterion.
I prefer Python's indentation to the curly braces of C/C++/Java, but my favorite is to have a keyword end the block, as in Fortran or Visual Basic, for example
if (test) then
something
endif
Without semicolons and braces littering the code, I think Fortran 90 and later versions have a cleaner syntax than the curly brace languages.
I use implicit none in all Fortran code, but I don't think that "large, serious projects" in Python should require variable declarations in all cases, even if Python had that feature. An advantage of Python's duck typing is that generic programming is simple. As a trivial example, a function such as
def twice(x):
return 2*x
will work for integers, floats, and Numarray arrays of integers and floats. Requiring x to be declared would needlessly limit the functionality of function 'twice'.
What I would like in Python is that ability to declare constants, similar to "const" in C++ or "parameter" in Fortran.
Btw Pyrex is a Python-based language with declarations.
One can buy "classic" books such as "Pride and Prejudice" used from Amazon (and other places) for $1-$2 plus the price of shipping. I prefer the book format to a computer printout, and I'm not sure that the cost of printing the book is smaller.
:).
Maybe Gutenberg is better for searching or analyzing texts than reading them. Some novels have complicated plots. I wonder if computerized plot summaries generated by analyzing the text are possible? Sounds like a job for a Perlmonger
This post is nonsense. First of all, Fortran is not "dead" . There are about 10 Fortran 95 compilers, listed at http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Language s/Fortran/Compilers/ , and compilers are adding features from the recently approved Fortran 2003 standard. Two reasons Fortran did lose much market share were
(1) the slow arrival of the Fortran 90 standard, which added dynamic memory allocation, a full set of control structures, user-defined types and free source form, and which otherwise remedied the defects of Fortran 77.
(2) the lack of a free Fortran 90 compiler.
G95 does implement practically all of Fortran 95, including the features listed in (1), and gfortran is progressing towards that goal. It is obscene to accuse the volunteers of g95 and gfortran of "killing Fortran".
At present, there are numerous features of Fortran 95 that gfortran (the gcc Fortran 95 compiler) does not handle correctly. G95 http://www.g95.org/, from which gfortran forked, is closer to being a full Fortran compiler. One can search the Usenet group comp.lang.fortran to confirm these statements.
If you just want a free Fortran 95 compiler use g95. Bugs reported to Andy Vaught are usually fixed quickly, and fresh Linux compiler binaries are posted almost daily. If you want to participate in the development of a Fortran 95 compiler, gfortran is more democratic.
PathScale is slightly faster than Intel on the AMD Opteron Linux platform for Fortran 90 programs according to numbers from Polyhedron http://www.polyhedron.co.uk/compare/linux/f90bench _AMD.html
Gates is wrong in thinking that "high schools must be redesigned to prepare every student for college". Many if not most people do not have the intelligence to do real college level work. You can manufacture as many "college graduates" as you want by lowering standards enough. U.S. high school students trail their peers in most other countries on standardized tests, but they go to college at higher rates. That does not make sense.
1 .asp/ . The current system is designed more to benefit teachers than students, because the teachers are much more organized through teachers' unions than parents are. Peter Brimelow discusses this in his recent book "The Worm in the Apple".
Teens who are not academically inclined should be encouraged to go to work, as explained by Thomas Sowell at http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell05220
Thanks for the info.
How could monetary damages be computed? For illegal use of a commercial product, the damages could be some multiple of the license fees that should have been paid, but GPL'ed software has no monetary cost.
I wonder how much "bite" the GPL has. Has any company ever been forced by a lawsuit to open-source software it distributed because it used GPL'ed code?
If a company does not buy the proper licenses for the commercial software it uses, it could held liable for damages in a civil suit. There is a clear "victim".
>I don't think you can claim "Fortran" is more >correct than "FORTRAN", or vice versa. The >standards people still say "FORTRAN". Then >again, it's a natural tendency to >say "Fortran", since it's not an acronym. Then >again, if IBM still cared about the trademark, >you'd get a letter from their lawyers every >time you did so.
The official spelling has been "Fortran" since the 1990 standard. I don't think either "Fortran" or "FORTRAN" is an IBM trademark.
>Could you give specifics, please? That post was >a bit too abstract to give any credence to. >What calculations? Why do these use less code
:: x(:,:,:)
.
:: person :: age,weight
:: players(10,20)
>(and how do they compare to C++, with its use >of operators and templates?).
Fortran 90/95/2003 shines in its treatment of multidimensional arrays. It resembles Matlab, with the advantages (and disadvantages) of a compiled language. Here are some of its specific strengths:
(1) To dynamically allocate a 3D array the code is just
real, allocatable
allocate (x(n1,n2,n3))
It's messier in C++.
(2) The array can be passed to a function just as a scalar is, without needing to mess with pointers. Arrays know their own size, so the dimensions of the array need not be passed as function arguments.
(3) Most intrinsic functions of Fortran are elemental, so exponentiating array x is done with just
x = exp(x)
No need for a triple loop as in C++.
(4) There are fast, flexible array intrinsic functions. If x is a matrix, one can compute the sum of all elements, the sum of each column, and the sum of each row with just
y = sum(x)
y = sum(x,dim=1)
y = sum(x,dim=2)
(5) One can work with arbitrary array sections with notation such as x(1:n1:2,:n2-1)
(6) One can define elemental functions and subroutines that operate on a scalar or an array of any dimension, just as the intrinsic functions do.
(7) Arrays of user-defined-types are convenient to work with. For example, given a data type
type
real
end type person
One can declare
type(person)
and then access the array of ages with just
players%age
In C/C++ one has built-in access only to the age of a single person with something like
players[0][0]%age
(8) Arrays can have a lower bound of 1 (the default) or any other integer. For many if not most calculations, 1-based indexing is more natural.
(9) The basic array syntax of
x(i,j,k)
in Fortran is more readable than the awkward
x[i][j][k]
of C/C++
Fortran rules!
>I have never lost this bizarre fondness I have >for that ugly, unwieldy, but somehow cool >FORTRAN.
Fortran 90 makes C/C++/Java look unwieldy by comparison. Here is the classic Hello World program:
Fortran:
print*,"Hello World"
end
C
#include
int main(void)
{
printf("Hello World!\n");
}
Java
class myfirstjavaprog
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}
Simpler is better.
Not funny. The kid may deserve to go to jail, but no one deserves to be raped.
Quoting the site http://climateprediction.net/info/part_faq.php/ ,
t ran90/ ,
"The programming and resources involved in running a full-scale climate model is tremendous, as well as the peer-review required over years of academics using something like the UK Met Office model. The UK Met Office model is not "open source" -- it is an extremely large, complicated system (something like 500,000 lines of Fortran; two miles of continuous paper if printed out and laid end-to-end). The UK Met Office has been superb in allowing us to bring it over to run on a Windows platform and distribute to the world. They are certainly not getting any money out of it."
I think they ought to disclose what Fortran compiler and what options were used to create the Windows executables.
According to http://www.meto.gov.uk/research/nwp/numerical/for
"The Unified Model was originally written in the Fortran 77 programming language with some low level routines written in C to aid portability. Now however, Fortran 90 is increasingly used to take advantage of its new features and to facilitate exchange of code between different international meteorological organizations. Some components of the Unified Model such as the observation processing system and the variational data assimilation system have been written entirely in Fortran 90."
Quoting the site http://www.infoaging.org/b-neuro-1-what.html , whose findings agree with other material I have read:
"Most studies show that, in general, cognitive abilities are the greatest when people are in their 30s and 40s. Cognitive abilities stay about the same until the late 50s or early 60s, at which point they begin to decline, but to only a small degree. The effects of cognitive changes are usually not noticed until the 70s and beyond."
statistics:s .shtml
R http://www.r-project.org/
WinBugs http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/winbugs/content
symbolic mathematics:
Maxima http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
numerics:
Octave http://www.octave.org/
Scilab http://scilabsoft.inria.fr/
g95 (Fortran 95 compiler)http://www.g95.org/
Having a large market share does not by itself make one a monopolist. I don't consider Microsoft to be a monopoly, because no law forces you to use their OS. Probably the market share of Microsoft Windows will be lower 20 years from now than today -- because of COMPETITION from Linux, Mac OS X, and perhaps other OS's yet to be created.
Real monopolies are organizations like the U.S. Postal Service or the Canadian health care system, which by LAW are shielded from competition.
People CHOOSE to use Windows because it
easy-to-use, inexpensive, and complemented by a huge amount of software.
Intel had a "monopoly" on computer chips, until AMD got its act together and produced something better with the Opteron.
I agree with you in supporting Microsoft's freedom to add things to their operating system. Most people don't want to fiddle with their computer adding various software programs. The more functionality Microsoft can incorporate in their OS, the better. An advantage for consumers in having more functionality in the OS is that if something does not work, Microsoft is more clearly to blame.
Why can Apple and the various Linux distributions add whatever they want to their OS's, but not Microsoft?
The Linux advocates who say they favor freedom and choice in computing, but at the same time want the government to cripple Microsoft, are quite inconsistent.
If this post is regarded as "insightful", I must say that the moderators need to learn some economics. Do you think that WalMart pays less than Goldman Sachs because the big shots at Goldman Sachs are kind and generous people? If certain WalMart employees don't earn that much, it's because no other employer is bidding more for their skills. That's what their labor is worth on the free market. WalMart is a great benefactor of the lower and middle classes, because it expands their purchasing power. If you think WalMart is mean, try starting a small business, hiring away WalMart employees at higher wages, and making a profit. THEN you have to right to bash WalMart. Talk is cheap.
Students who like math and want to learn how to program should consider learning Fortran. There is a free compiler called g95 -- see http://www.g95.org/ . A clean subset of Fortran 95 called F, especially useful for teaching, is available -- see http://www.fortran.com/F/index.html/ . Yes, Fortran is an old language, and some people have written spaghetti code in it -- in what language have they not? But versions of Fortran since the 1990 standard have all the features needed to write clean, modularized code.