[J3] [EXTERNAL] [BULK] Re: Niklaus Wirth

[Holcomb, Katherine A (kah3f)]

I didn’t comment previously on Thomas’ daughter’s experience since it was somewhat tangential, but having encountered plenty such condescension in my time, I would suggest that “could be misogyny” is pretty likely to be true, along with the general arrogance of certain faculty types who always know what is right, and it’s whatever they learned in graduate school 30 years ago.  And I’ve not seen a lot of evidence that most scientists who do their own coding even really grasp OOP so it’s particularly ironic they’d say such a thing to a younger person.

Also, we shouldn’t entirely blame CS faculty.  When I was in college in the late 1970s, computer science was often either still embedded within a department like math, or was newly created, so the faculty had some connection to numerical programming.  By the 1980s CS had their own agenda, but scientists and engineers tended to think they should follow CS’s lead for programming and that CS would know what was “modern” programming.  Especially in engineering departments they might teach some Matlab, but they’d send students to CS if the science/engineering undergrads got any formal programming instruction at all.  On the other hand, here the physics department teaches programming to students and to me it’s a bit comical.  They resisted moving to Python from C because “C is the most popular programming language in the world” (I don’t know whether that was true even then, maybe in LOC it was the leader) even though Python would be much better for beginners and also allow them to do something interesting other than implement Gaussian elimination (yes, they had them do that).  They do have a decent Python-based course now but at least one faculty member still teaches what he calls C++.  As I have certain powers as a staff member, when a student in the course was having some trouble using a cluster frontend I had to look at some of his files, and I found his classwork “something.cpp” files and there was not a single line in any of them that wasn’t plain C.  Of course g++ will happily compile such source so they didn’t seem to know the difference.

Something I’ve noticed in current students in many fields, even to some extent CS students, is an increasing inability to function outside of Jupyter.  The aforementioned Python physics course is entirely based around notebooks. They are fine as far as they go but in my opinion, they inhibit students from learning to think of source as a holistic unit.  There are kernels for C++ and apparently even Fortran but they’re not going to really be as suited to such an interactive environment, especially Fortran with the requirement of declaring variables in a nonexecutable block before any executable cell, er, code.

Katherine Holcomb
UVA Research Computing  https://www.rc.virginia.edu
kah3f at virginia.edu<mailto:kah3f at virginia.edu>    434-982-5948
From: J3 <j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org> On Behalf Of Damian Rouson via J3
Sent: Monday, January 8, 2024 1:40 PM
To: General J3 interest list <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>
Cc: Damian Rouson <rouson at lbl.gov>
Subject: Re: [J3] [EXTERNAL] [BULK] Re: Niklaus Wirth



On Mon, Jan 8, 2024 at 5:03 AM Clune, Thomas L. (GSFC-6101) via J3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org<mailto:j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>> wrote:
From my (admittedly rather limited) experience, anti-Fortran prejudice was quite pronounced in the mid-eighties when I was attending college.     Possibly even justified during that era.    My sense is that computer science profs never really adapted after that.  They all “knew” what Fortran (FORTRAN) was/is, and there were no real forces to revise such opinions.  And they then used FORTRAN as the punching bag when teaching subsequent generations.  Even at its best, Fortran was not really ever a language that would appeal in that profession where shiny/different has a higher priority.

All true and those priorities are largely set by funding agencies and tenure/promotion committees that all prioritize revolutionary work (even if most of it most of it doesn't survive long-term) over evolutionary work (even if a lot of it would have immediate, widespread, positive impact).


Even in science departments there is pronounced ignorance about modern Fortran.  My daughter just completed her PhD in computational chemistry at UC Berkeley.    Profs there were dismissive when she pointed out that Fortran had OO and such.   She was simply wrong.   (Could be some misogyny mixing in with this of course.)

Wow. :(

Damian
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