Re: programing with science jobs

On Nov 12, 7:16 am, jmfbah...@xxxxxxx wrote:
In article <b52k05-n5h....@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, j...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
hhc...@xxxxxxxxx <hhc...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip Androcrap>

Damn, get a clue. The poster that we are responsing to has not yet
even graduated from highschool!
Give the kid a break.

He asked a serious questions regarding his future programming needs
for studies in physics, math, and engineering, and I answered him to
the best of my ability and related experience. I stopped short of
telling him that a slide rule is a basic need during his college exams
(much faster and less confusing than using a calculator).

I should hope not since they are now collector's items.

They are? Doesn't anybody manufacture them? I wanted to get
a circular one and learn how to use it.



<snip>

The bottom line question is: Does anyone here belive that a knowledge
of assembly language, 'C', Fortran and BASIC programming could be a
disadvantage or and advantege to this future college student? Let's
have a show of hands.

It would be almost impossible to be any sort of scientist or engineer
and not do some programming these days.

It would also be highly unlikely that one can get through any
technical course in college without doing some programming.

I would recommend to take a good intro course where the prof is
a crusty old PITA and believes that the kids need to learn how
computers don't add.





Finally, everyone puts down BASIC as being unsophisticated, which to
me simply means that it it is being put down because anyone can,
without a lot of programming education, wite a simple basic program. I
tend to like it for simple, non-real-time, computations. Then too, you
can download BASIC for free, and it will run on just about every
computer. As a freshman physics or math sudent, it would be my first
choice.

BASIC is unsophisticated because one of the reasons it was invented
was to teach programming fundamentals and it is quite good for that
as well as simple problem solving.

C is a lot more common for real world problems and simple to learn
once you learn the basics using BASIC.

Fortran and assembly aren't widely used anymore, but if the kid goes
into one of those fields where they are used, both are pretty simple
to learn if you've gone the BASIC to C route.

There is still lots of FORTRAN code out there (I don't know about
Fortran). Being able to read it and get an idea of what the code
does (rather than reading comments which are always not quite correct)
is a good idea.

Not a whole lot of call to run it, but certainly a lot of
need to read it, especially if you are involved in numerical
calculations. A lot of classic code was written in FORTRAN.
Just last year I was adapting some navigation algorithms
from FORTRAN to C and Matlab.

I guess if you know BASIC you can figure out a
FORTRAN program ...and visa versa.

I remember a couple of pronouncements from Djikstra
about that subject (prior to the introduction of C, I
believe). One was that he didn't know what the programming
language of the next century would be, but it would
probably be called "FORTRAN". The other was that
anybody who started their programming in BASIC was
brain-damaged for life.

- Randy

.

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