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- Path: sparky!uunet!decwrl!deccrl!news.crl.dec.com!nikhil
- From: nikhil@crl.dec.com (R.S. Nikhil)
- Subject: Re: Scientists as Programmers (was Re: Small Language Wanted)
- Message-ID: <1992Aug28.203912.7279@crl.dec.com>
- Sender: news@crl.dec.com (USENET News System)
- Organization: DEC Cambridge Research Lab
- References: <1992Aug25.154501.8654@colorado.edu> <1992Aug26.192410.6523@ultb.isc.rit.edu> <1992Aug27.154823.583@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> <BtpAIn.EE5@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <1992Aug28.170149.24258@relay.nswc.navy.mil>
- Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 20:39:12 GMT
- Lines: 21
-
- I couldn't find previous articles in this thread, so pardon me if I'm repeating
- this: I once found the following amusing quote by Bill Gosper in an issue of
- Science (vol 255, page 1150):
-
- ``An exciting thing was happening at Livermore. They were building a
- supercomputer, and I will certainly confess to being a cycle junkie.
- Computers are never big enough or fast enough. I have no patience at
- all with these damned PC's. What I didn't realize when I went over to
- Livermore was that as long as physicists are running the show you're
- never going to get any software. And if you don't get any software,
- you're never going to get anywhere. Physicists have the most abysmal
- taste in programming environments. It's the software equivalent of a
- junk-strewn lab with plug boards, bare wires and alligator clips.
- They also seem to think that computers (and programmers for that
- matter) are the sorts of things to which you submit punched card decks
- like you did in the mid-sixties.''
-
- --- Bill Gosper, in ``More Mathematical People: Contemporary Conversations''
- (Donald J. Albers et. al., Eds.; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
-
- Nikhil (nikhil@crl.dec.com)
-