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I wonder if this is a Java problem. My impression is that most intro comp sci classes now teach Java. Meanwhile, all the scientists I know work in Python, Perl,

I wonder if this is a Java problem. My impression is that most intro comp sci classes now teach Java. Meanwhile, all the scientists I know work in Python, Perl, C, Matlab, Mathematica, or LabVIEW. Last I knew, there were even quite a few FORTRAN holdouts. Why should scientists respect a comp sci intro class built on a language and a set of design patterns that reek of the cube farm, when all of their actual work is done using languages and systems that they will inevitably have to teach to themselves because nobody offers a formal course? Surely the need to impress the math department is a great use case for an introductory course in Lisp or Scheme. Not that this is an original idea or anything.

speek 18y ago
lucky for me, my university (northeastern) teaches both java and scheme. I think one of the guys who wrote HtDP is a northeasstern comp sci professor. Intro to comp sci is scheme, honors freshman comp sci is java, and I think down the road it branches off into assembly, C++ (which I know engineering students take alongside MatLab), and Lisp. I could be wrong, but I'm in engineering (switching into comp sci and cog psych).
maximilian 18y ago
MANY physicists still code in fortran. Its blazing fast for the numerics they do and pretty simple to learn. I personally would just teach them C, but there are sooo many math libraries written in Fortran that it has a lot of momentum in the physics community.
- quantumhobbit 18y ago
  Old joke: Q:What will the scientific computing language of the 1980's but like? A:I don't know but it will be called Fortran. My undergrad physics department taught a course in Fortran because the Comp Sci department refused to teach it. It's only been a few years but I think they are still teaching it. Fortran is nearly as fast as C and far easier to use than C, so there hasn't really been a drive to switch the huge amount of Fortran code out there to C. I think that if anything kills off Fortran it will be Python or something similarly easy to teach to undergrads.
  - etal 18y ago
    Yep, my school recently started teaching Python as the intro programming language -- for the bioinformatics program, at least. C, C++ and Fortran have similar enough characteristics and capabilities for scientific work that once a researcher has learned one, there's not much benefit to learning either of the others. But scripting/glue languages make it possible to hack together something in an afternoon that's impressive enough to get another scientist's attention and perhaps consider that languages do matter. I think Python will convince new scientists that C++ and Fortran deserve to be replaced, and another fast, easy-to-parallelize language will be the actual replacement.
- hugh 18y ago
  I'm not convinced that Fortran has any remaining advantages. Sure, a bunch of libraries (BLAS and LAPACK in particular) may be written in Fortran, but that doesn't mean you can't call them from C. Maybe there are some uncallable-from-C libraries out there that I don't know about, but I'm pretty sure the only reason physicists still use Fortran is that they have old legacy code (and/or old legacy collaborators). I use Fortran every day, and I can't stand it. But it's quite common to find physicists, even young ones, who only know Fortran.
liuliu 18y ago
Nod. That indeed the problem of Java. I even wonder why university teaches intro course with Java other than C. C is good to demonstrate how the computer actual works and the time/space complexity of program for CS people. For science people, why do not teach them matlab/python/fortran things that may more helpful to do scientific calculation?
gcheong 18y ago
I think this quote from an ACM interview with Donald Knuth in answer to a question on the future of programming sums up the problem of the current state of programming nicely: "I'm worried about the present state of programming. Programmers now are supposed to mostly just use libraries. Programmers aren't allowed to do their own thing from scratch anymore. They're supposed to assemble reusable code that somebody else has written. There's a bunch of things on the menu and you choose from these and put them together. Where's the fun in that? Where's the beauty in that? We have to figure out a way we can make programming interesting for the next generation of programmers." reference: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378715 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378715
- potatolicious 18y ago
  Typical bottom-up thinking. While I do enjoy rolling my own libs from scratch from time to time, the availability of a lot of reusable, well-documented, well-designed code have permitted me to tackle, as a single person, projects that would not have been possible years ago. I wanted to create a 3D data visualization app just for kicks a while back. Guess what, I didn't have to roll my own OpenGL graphics libs, nor my XML parser, but I still had a blast putting it all together, and being able to focus on UI (the main motivator for the project) instead of the nitty gritty behind the scenes. I think it's valid to have some concern about coders becoming less capable at low-level code-from-scratch principles, but I don't think it's fair to say that the library-centric development today is less fun.
  - derefr 18y ago
    Knuth thinks in algorithms, not solutions. In his day, people were constantly inventing new algorithms--if you've never done it before, you should at least be able to guess that it's a big rush. That's what Knuth thinks of programming as: a series of completely new inventions and associated rushes. What he's actually trying to say was that, as a usefully large number of algorithms for everyday tasks have already been discovered (optimally, even!) and codified into "libraries", people are running out of (easy) things to invent, and so aren't getting that rush as often. What was needed, in his mind, was a replacement for the rush, as that was what he saw as the raison d'etre of programming; being a mathematician himself, it was probably the only reason he programmed at all! Of course, we've gotten on just fine without the rush. "Programming" as solving problems has continued to flourish; Knuth's "programming"--really referring to the scientific method applied, as it should be, to Computer Science--has quieted. It used to be that every programmer was a practicing computer scientist by necessity, just as every astronaut is currently an astrophysicist by necessity. When "platforms of discovery" (computers being one, the vacuum of space being another) mature, the need (or ability) for their practitioners to be involved in the creation of the theory underlying the field diminishes. This doesn't mean the field "dies"--it merely segregates.
jcromartie 18y ago
My wife spent a few years in an aerospace engineering major, and I was quite confused when she ended up in a "C++ For Engineers" class. C++? Really? For engineers? They don't even teach C++ to comp sci students anymore. Why not Python or something where they can just crunch numbers and write programs instead of learning how to navigate the minefield that is the C preprocessor and the C++ STL?
- Tamerlin 18y ago
  "They don't even teach C++ to comp sci students anymore." I've been wondering about that one for a while now, because throughout my career as a software developer, some of the worst programmers I've encountered have been people with comp sci degrees.
- jmatt 18y ago
  software for embedded systems is still in C and C++ and that is generally what engineers care about when they are coding. I agree it sucks, and it's too bad they can't move away from it sooner rather than later. Probably a great niche for any number of programming languages - if you can ever get the big multi-nationals and military to adopt it.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  C is next to ideal for low-level programming. Its many traps and pitfalls are actually advantages in this scenario.
- run4yourlives 18y ago
  For learning all the crazy and bad things you can do with programming languages, C++ can't be beat.
bbgm 18y ago
Not quite true. I know a lot of scientists who program in Java (depends on the community) and there are any number of companies supporting scientific computing that are Java shops as well. Usually you will see a mix of Java or C++, a scripting language (python seems to be the most common) and Matlab. And yep some Fortran holdouts
- schtog 18y ago
  The people using Python are they using scipy+matplotlib or MatLab for the numerical stuff?
  - etal 18y ago
    Depends on the field -- I think Matlab is still a little more popular, especially among engineers, but SciPy (or just plain NumPy) is good for biologists. There's also a need for glue code and other non-numerical scripting. For example, PyMol is a pretty popular program for molecule visualization, and as you can guess, Python is its scripting language.

speek 18y ago

lucky for me, my university (northeastern) teaches both java and scheme. I think one of the guys who wrote HtDP is a northeasstern comp sci professor. Intro to comp sci is scheme, honors freshman comp sci is java, and I think down the road it branches off into assembly, C++ (which I know engineering students take alongside MatLab), and Lisp. I could be wrong, but I'm in engineering (switching into comp sci and cog psych).

maximilian 18y ago

MANY physicists still code in fortran. Its blazing fast for the numerics they do and pretty simple to learn. I personally would just teach them C, but there are sooo many math libraries written in Fortran that it has a lot of momentum in the physics community.

quantumhobbit 18y ago
Old joke: Q:What will the scientific computing language of the 1980's but like? A:I don't know but it will be called Fortran. My undergrad physics department taught a course in Fortran because the Comp Sci department refused to teach it. It's only been a few years but I think they are still teaching it. Fortran is nearly as fast as C and far easier to use than C, so there hasn't really been a drive to switch the huge amount of Fortran code out there to C. I think that if anything kills off Fortran it will be Python or something similarly easy to teach to undergrads.
- etal 18y ago
  Yep, my school recently started teaching Python as the intro programming language -- for the bioinformatics program, at least. C, C++ and Fortran have similar enough characteristics and capabilities for scientific work that once a researcher has learned one, there's not much benefit to learning either of the others. But scripting/glue languages make it possible to hack together something in an afternoon that's impressive enough to get another scientist's attention and perhaps consider that languages do matter. I think Python will convince new scientists that C++ and Fortran deserve to be replaced, and another fast, easy-to-parallelize language will be the actual replacement.
hugh 18y ago
I'm not convinced that Fortran has any remaining advantages. Sure, a bunch of libraries (BLAS and LAPACK in particular) may be written in Fortran, but that doesn't mean you can't call them from C. Maybe there are some uncallable-from-C libraries out there that I don't know about, but I'm pretty sure the only reason physicists still use Fortran is that they have old legacy code (and/or old legacy collaborators). I use Fortran every day, and I can't stand it. But it's quite common to find physicists, even young ones, who only know Fortran.

liuliu 18y ago

Nod. That indeed the problem of Java. I even wonder why university teaches intro course with Java other than C. C is good to demonstrate how the computer actual works and the time/space complexity of program for CS people. For science people, why do not teach them matlab/python/fortran things that may more helpful to do scientific calculation?

gcheong 18y ago

I think this quote from an ACM interview with Donald Knuth in answer to a question on the future of programming sums up the problem of the current state of programming nicely: "I'm worried about the present state of programming. Programmers now are supposed to mostly just use libraries. Programmers aren't allowed to do their own thing from scratch anymore. They're supposed to assemble reusable code that somebody else has written. There's a bunch of things on the menu and you choose from these and put them together. Where's the fun in that? Where's the beauty in that? We have to figure out a way we can make programming interesting for the next generation of programmers." reference: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378715 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378715

potatolicious 18y ago
Typical bottom-up thinking. While I do enjoy rolling my own libs from scratch from time to time, the availability of a lot of reusable, well-documented, well-designed code have permitted me to tackle, as a single person, projects that would not have been possible years ago. I wanted to create a 3D data visualization app just for kicks a while back. Guess what, I didn't have to roll my own OpenGL graphics libs, nor my XML parser, but I still had a blast putting it all together, and being able to focus on UI (the main motivator for the project) instead of the nitty gritty behind the scenes. I think it's valid to have some concern about coders becoming less capable at low-level code-from-scratch principles, but I don't think it's fair to say that the library-centric development today is less fun.
- derefr 18y ago
  Knuth thinks in algorithms, not solutions. In his day, people were constantly inventing new algorithms--if you've never done it before, you should at least be able to guess that it's a big rush. That's what Knuth thinks of programming as: a series of completely new inventions and associated rushes. What he's actually trying to say was that, as a usefully large number of algorithms for everyday tasks have already been discovered (optimally, even!) and codified into "libraries", people are running out of (easy) things to invent, and so aren't getting that rush as often. What was needed, in his mind, was a replacement for the rush, as that was what he saw as the raison d'etre of programming; being a mathematician himself, it was probably the only reason he programmed at all! Of course, we've gotten on just fine without the rush. "Programming" as solving problems has continued to flourish; Knuth's "programming"--really referring to the scientific method applied, as it should be, to Computer Science--has quieted. It used to be that every programmer was a practicing computer scientist by necessity, just as every astronaut is currently an astrophysicist by necessity. When "platforms of discovery" (computers being one, the vacuum of space being another) mature, the need (or ability) for their practitioners to be involved in the creation of the theory underlying the field diminishes. This doesn't mean the field "dies"--it merely segregates.

jcromartie 18y ago

My wife spent a few years in an aerospace engineering major, and I was quite confused when she ended up in a "C++ For Engineers" class. C++? Really? For engineers? They don't even teach C++ to comp sci students anymore. Why not Python or something where they can just crunch numbers and write programs instead of learning how to navigate the minefield that is the C preprocessor and the C++ STL?

Tamerlin 18y ago
"They don't even teach C++ to comp sci students anymore." I've been wondering about that one for a while now, because throughout my career as a software developer, some of the worst programmers I've encountered have been people with comp sci degrees.
jmatt 18y ago
software for embedded systems is still in C and C++ and that is generally what engineers care about when they are coding. I agree it sucks, and it's too bad they can't move away from it sooner rather than later. Probably a great niche for any number of programming languages - if you can ever get the big multi-nationals and military to adopt it.
rbanffy 18y ago
C is next to ideal for low-level programming. Its many traps and pitfalls are actually advantages in this scenario.
run4yourlives 18y ago
For learning all the crazy and bad things you can do with programming languages, C++ can't be beat.

bbgm 18y ago

Not quite true. I know a lot of scientists who program in Java (depends on the community) and there are any number of companies supporting scientific computing that are Java shops as well. Usually you will see a mix of Java or C++, a scripting language (python seems to be the most common) and Matlab. And yep some Fortran holdouts

schtog 18y ago
The people using Python are they using scipy+matplotlib or MatLab for the numerical stuff?
- etal 18y ago
  Depends on the field -- I think Matlab is still a little more popular, especially among engineers, but SciPy (or just plain NumPy) is good for biologists. There's also a need for glue code and other non-numerical scripting. For example, PyMol is a pretty popular program for molecule visualization, and as you can guess, Python is its scripting language.