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From: john@ghostwheel.unm.edu (John Prentice)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran vs. C argument
Message-ID: <1990Dec5.011038.12618@ariel.unm.edu>
Date: 5 Dec 90 01:10:38 GMT
References: <28621@usc>
Sender: news@ariel.unm.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: University of New Mexico Math Dept., Albuquerque, NM
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In article <28621@usc> ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes:
>
>Religious wars aren't too useful to anyone concerned.

Your posting certainly doesn't sound very secular!

>(show me a bright kid leaving college today who's actually 
>enthusiastic about Fortran).
>

Ah, are you still beating your wife?  Come on, this is a really
dogmatic statement.  You know, this gets to the heart of the original
debate.  Computer scientists just can't seem to understand that to most
scientists, no programming language is particularly exciting.  If that
was what turned them one, they probably would have gone into computer
science.  You can argue all you want about whether this is a good thing
or not, but it isn't going to change a thing so long as the debate is
only amongst the high priests of programming.  If one language is superior
to another, frame your arguments in terms of what does it do for the
scientist that he needs?  Questions of efficiency are important there.
So are questions of the difficulty of learning the language (what, you
are not up to date on the latest theories of high temperature supercondutivity!
Where have you been, reading about programming languages?  Come on, get
with the program, stay up with the latest physics or get dumped.  What?  You
don't have time to do that and stay up with the latest computer science?
Get your priorities straight man, computers are mere tools, not science. ----
YOU THINK THIS SOUNDS STUPID, HEY, THAT IS THE WAY IT IS OUT THERE). 
Fortran continues to be dominant scientifically because people know it, it
is very easy to learn, and it has most of the structures that most scientists 
need.  That may not satisfy the computer community, but that is the reality.
If  you really want to help scientists (as opposed to convert them), develop
automated or symbolic tools for doing scientific calculations so that we
don't need to know ANY programming language.  Now that would be useful.

John Prentice
john@unmfys.unm.edu


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