NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19/NN_1992_19.iso/spool/comp/edu/1403

Internet Message Format | 1992-08-29 | 5.8 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Matt Kennel)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.lang.fortran,comp.lang.misc,sci.math
Subject: Re: Scientists as Programmers (was Re: Small Language Wanted)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 28 Aug 92 23:28:36 GMT
References: <[e-mail]>
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[e-mail] (Herman Rubin) writes:
: The problem is that the CS people are, in this sense, like the purissima
: mathematicians (if it can be applied, it is time to work on something else.)
: They concentrate on what no scientist is particularly worried about, like
: making the printed output look neat, or even making life easy for the
: compiler.


: Most good scientists can think of their problem, and how reasonable operations
: can attack it.  But the languages do not facilitate this, and often even if
: the features are present, they are in some obfuscated syntax.

I agree.  I believe the CS vs. Science programming divide is cultural, but
I'm going be somewhat partisan and blame the programming authorities a bit more
than the scientists.

My view of things:

1) There are scientists who don't know the value of organized software
    engineering.  I mean basic things like type-checking subroutine
    arguments, modularization, modern data types, and other things like
    that.  They write the infamous spaghetti Fortran.

2)  There are computer scientists who don't understand the demands of
    scientific computing, which is understandable, because they never
    write scientific programs.

The problem is this:

There are scientists who *have* learned the value of good software
engineering and believe what the comptuer scientists have said for years, and
honestly try to stay up to date.

Too many CSoids however dismiss the concerns of scientists as being
narrow and "uninformed", assuming that they're all like the nerds in
#1 above.  Or they claim that language X does what scientists need
(or "no we don't need to bother because it's possible to implement that
in a library" or "a quality of implementation issue" (a euphemism for
"we don't really give a shit") ) and say that we're silly when we disagree.

Software technology and practice for addressing the particular concerns of
computer scientists has advanced tremendously since the early days, but the
model of scientific computation hasn't changed much since early Fortran
except vicariously through the progress in "regular" computer science.

I personally would love a "Numerical Eiffel" type of language, but I bet the
Eiffel gurus would say "eeuy yuck, you're polluting our pristine creation
with needless cruft".  One of the Modula-3 people has said that one of
their design goals was to make it good for numerical computation (a
refreshing attitude).  One of the examples was "easy access to the IEEE
rounding modes" (what the f*???) as standard in the library, but admitted that
complex numbers weren't, much less array operations.

I don't want "good for numerical computation" to mean "not all that much
worse than Fortran 77"!

I believe Herman Rubin and other mathemeticians when they say that they want
good performance and easy use of multiprecision integers and fixed point
numbers, even though I and most physicists, would never have a use for
them.  So can the computer scientists accept our needs as well?  Remember,
it's the scientific programmers who *DO* want change who are doing all the
complaining--the "old farts" just keep on banging out Fortran and mind their
own business.

Scientists don't want to needlessly accept *regress* in concrete areas in
order to make supposed "progress" in areas they haven't been convinced they
want.  The progress has to be good enough to convince departmental computer
comittees to buy a new $2000 compiler.  Notice that scientists aren't
all that hidebound by tradition---they enthusiastically take up Maple
and Mathematica---because they can immediately recognize progress, and
even despite their lack of "goto". :-)

And finally the old standby "why speed is in fact, important".  Why does
factor of 2 matter?  It's the old "the program is everything" view.  Running
any particular one program faster is not, in fact, what matters.  What does
matter, is that with a faster machine and a faster language I can do *more*
and *better* science.  (I could easily use up a 10 teraflop machine next
month.) Many times we're running things on hardware far too underpowered to
"do the job right" in any case, but science accepts approximate solutions.

Take the statement, "Scientific progress is proportional to the logarithm of
computer power."

The computer scientist hears this and says "You silly fools, if you
saw the big picture you'd realize that the constant factor doesn't matter
one bit so quit complaining."

The scientist hears this and says "Well that's why we need to get
all we can get, and then some, in order to make progress."


I think there is in fact some hope.

Specifically, the parallel- and super- computer research community.
In it, there are people who truly understand both the computer scientists
and the scientific users and are committed to progress rather than
defining away the problem as uninteresting or trivial.

: --
: Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
: Phone: [phone]
: [e-mail] (Internet, bitnet)
: {purdue,pur-ee}!pop.stat!hrubin(UUCP)

--
-Matt Kennel          [e-mail]
-Institute for Nonlinear Science, University of California, San Diego
-*** AD: Archive for nonlinear dynamics papers & programs: FTP to
-***     lyapunov.ucsd.edu, username "anonymous".