NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19/NN_1992_19.iso/spool/comp/edu/1345

Internet Message Format | 1992-09-01 | 1.8 KB

Xref: sparky comp.edu:1345 comp.lang.fortran:3180
Path: sparky!uunet!wupost!waikato.ac.nz!aukuni.ac.nz!ecmtwhk
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: scientists as programmers (was: Small Language Wanted)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
From: [e-mail] (Thomas Koenig)
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 11:32:15 GMT
References: <[e-mail]>
Organization: University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Lines: 28

[e-mail] (Wade Schuette) writes:

>Suppose you can get 45 minutes of time, and hold a seminar on What every
>scientist should know about computing but probably doesnn't... or some such.

[...]

>Or maybe, this: if you had ONE thing you could try to get across, that would
>make sense to that audience in that time frame, what would it be?

Probably, the one thing I would try to get across is: If you have that
problem, chances are other people have stumbled across it before. See
wether you have part of the solution already handy, in the shape of
NAG, IMSL, or Netlib, or somewhere in your own department. Make sure
that software which gets written is reusable; make the writers DOCUMENT
their stuff.

Oh yes, and make the people use either straight SI units (without any
multiplicators) or dimensionless numbers. I recently had to wade through
a lot of subroutines which were calculating phyiscal properties of
substances; unfortunately, the author had neglected to write down the
dimensions. He had used kJ, diffusion coefficients in cm^2/s,
temperatures in both Kelvin and deg C, pressure in bar, ... wading
through all that almost took as much time as rewriting it from scratch.
--
Thomas Koenig, [e-mail], [e-mail]
The joy of engineering is to find a straight line on a double logarithmic
diagram.