On Thu, 11 Dec 1997 [log in to unmask] wrote:

> We can settle this quite easily. Does ANYBODY know of an
> under-30 programmer who GIVEN A CHOICE would prefer Fortran
> over the 'sexier' languages around ??

That depends on what you mean by "programmer". If you mean somone whose
specialiaty is computing, then that could be so. But if you mean people
who are specialists in other subjects, say one of the sciences, but who
write program as part of their daily life, then I know quite a few. The
last Fortran90 course I put on here for staff and research students had
over two dozen people attending - almost all of them, I think, were under
30. Some of them, I know, now have Fortran90 as their preferred
compiled language (let's exclude things like Perl5 which have a different
niche).

I have been involved in a number of scientific computing projects staffed
by a mixture of scientists and computer specialists: I found that it was
generally much easier to teach the scientists to program well, than to
teach the computer science graduates to understand the scientific
requirements.

Fortran has been popular for a long time because it is relatively easy to
learn - some would say too easy, because it is very easy to learn enough
to write bad programs without realising it. If science undergraduates are
taught enough about the importance of using the safety featurs of Fortran,
as I think is starting to happen, maybe that will change. I'm not sure
but I think is still easier to learn to program _well_ in Fortran90 than
in C++. For scientific code, the best of which which will continue to be
written mainly by scientists, that is an important factor.

I can see why computing specialists prefer C++ - it is so hard to use
properly that it takes on elements of a religion, which outsiders cannot
penetrate. Thus practitioners can invoke the mystique to get higher
salaries and higher status.

But I wonder if the rise of the computing specialist has reached its peak?
I think programming is gradually getting easier, after all constructing a
spread-sheet or writing a word processor macro is a form of programming,
and more and more people find they can do that. I'd welcome the demise of
the mystique - if Fortran90 and maybe safer subsets like F or ELF90 can
promote that, that's progress, to may way of thinking.

--
Clive Page, Internet: [log in to unmask]
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester, Phone +44 116 252 3551
Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K. Fax +44 116 252 3311



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