On Friday 02 May 2008 10:59:44 Alvaro Zuniga wrote: > Nice to see you got away with that. I bet the person managing the money > (and by default the program) thought it would be brilliant to incorporate > the project to his flagship project of standardizing the code of the > institution using a language that others, programmers or not, would find > more homey. > > It just makes more business sense they say. I guess there is not arguing > when it comes to bread and butter, peanut butter that is. > This was at a research facility that hired a lot of student workers and graduate assistants. The move that the university was to change the language of the numerical methods course from Fortran to VB. The argument was something along the lines of being able to write VBA macros for Excel. They paid me, I did my job, and I learned a lot from it.
They were really concerned about modernizing the software so that they would not necessarily have to hire a CS major to fix it. Lots of people fancy themselves programmers when given a simple enough language (cough - flash - cough). It's not the languages' fault. > On the other hand, I believe it is possible to write a masterwork using > Fortran or any language for that matter, one just need to work on the > design more carefully. In my humble unqualified opinion, modern languages > are hardly anything more than tools to help (force) organize source code > better, not a replacement of a well designed application. A legacy > structured programming language and the extensive use of Abstract Data > Types could make heads turn easily, not just any head though. > Yes! People trained in structured programming make all the difference. Modern languages have extensive libraries of common ADTs, so only a cursory knowledge is required there, unless you're writing the library. That sounds like blasphemy, but you only need so many people on your team in most environments that understand why to chose a red-black-tree over a singly linked list in certain cases. The rest will ask the subject matter expert, and that leaves them free to specialize in other areas. Peer reviews also help tremendously. They are the equivalent of sending your patch to the -dev list of a project to make sure it's good enough to commit to the repository. The more experienced members of your team can guide you when you need to put in a little more structure, or develop some esoteric data type. -- Thanks, Fernando Vilas [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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