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> Unix and C however form a powerful deterrent to the average astronomer to write her or his own code (and the average astronomer's C is much, much worse than h
by cheph 6y ago
> Unix and C however form a powerful deterrent to the average astronomer to write her or his own code (and the average astronomer's C is much, much worse than his Fortran used to be).
Compared to what? If I want to quickly bang out some code and run it, installing fedora (or another distro) is probbably the least painful way to get it done.
I would say that Windows is a powerful deterrent to the average person writing their own code much more so than Linux.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoThis is about Unix v.s. VMS, not Windows v.s. Linux.
- mwcampbell 6y agoThat's true. Still, I think cheph is right to point out that the situation has changed since then. I honestly got so caught up in the rhetoric of the OP that I had forgotten this for a moment.
- chungus_khan 6y agoIn particular, we now download whatever software tools we like from this lovely internet thing, so it's less of a concern what programming environment the OS bundles by default. Back then your choices on UNIX were to either accept whatever your vendor included (which would mostly be C), or buy a disk set of some other tools and hope they actually worked on your machine.