On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 11:47 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 10:15:01AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 09:44 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 09:34:20AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > >
> > > They use Linux/Unix because "somebody told them so", they
program in
> > > Fortran, Cobol, Algol or Modula, because "somebody told them
so", they
> > > do something "this way" because they don't know better and
don't "want
> > > to know better".
> >
> > That's a bit of oversimplification.
> I've worked in such an environment for many years, I know what I am
> talking about.
>
> An anecdote: I once met an EE-professor, who, when being asked why they
> were using Fortran answered: "Because our simulations are based on the
> Fortran punch cards I wrote during my PhD thesis 25 years ago".
> Consequently, his students and employees were programming Fortran.
>
> > In general scientists do coding
> > just fine but don't want to do more nor even think about it (no
> > packaging, no thoughts on system administration...).
> Well, in 90% of all such cases, "their coding" goes into implementing
> complex algorithms, while their programs complexity is not much
> different from "hello world".
This sounds quite arrogant.
Feel free to think what you want - These number cruncher guys apps
condense down to a
READ STDIN
CALL ALGORITHM
PRINT STDOUT
Their typical usage:
./myapp < inputdata >output
... wait <couple of days> ...
lpr output
> > However there
> > are IT people working together with scientists who do system
> > administration well.
>
> > Still the needs are specific and very different from other environments.
> I can not disagree more.
>
> These guys relation to programming / sys-administration is not much
> different from that of a 14-year old kid, whose IT skills are "browsing
> the web, running games, playing mp3s and using word processors", when it
> had a course in "programming in C" at school, and then starts to
> discover the subtleties of programming afterwards.
And in their spare time they invented the web including the first
implementation of web servers and clients.
May-be some of them ... The others were
busy keeping their machines hot.
Ralf