How I know it. I wish I had a way to recover the many, many hours I've spent dealing with FORTRAN code written by a man who obviously felt that IN, OUT, and INOUT were to be used for artistic expression rather than accurate representation of arguments, and who was absolutely in love with FORTRAN's willingness to decide the type of a variable for you.
Quote:Original post by SiCrane Fortran isn't dead yet, though I often wish it was. A lot of heavy number crunching libraries and projects are still done in Fortran.
A college buddy of mine got a degree in atmospheric sciences and is now working for the national weather service. [Much to his dismay heh] he has to write a bunch of programs in Fortran. What is it, fortran70 or something? Back from the 70's? There's no good reason they use that language other than that's all the old timers there know how to use.
But I can't think of any commercial software made in fortran. That would just be silly!
Well, I've seen projects that require C and projects that require C/C++ so if all C++ projects also count as C projects then the number of C projects would always be equal to, or larger then the number of C/C++ projects.
"Think you Disco Duck, think!" Professor Farnsworth
Quote:Original post by Colin Jeanne Scheme is the language used in UC Berkeley's introductory computer science course - a course designed for people that might not have had previous programming experience. This is the book we used.
Personally, I loved Scheme. Having used C-like languages for some six year prior I found Scheme to be a breath of fresh air.
I took that class too about 6 years back, CS 61A. Can't say I enjoyed it, add me to the Scheme hater camp. Well... I can't say I really hate it, but coming from a C programming background before going to school it was definitely not intuitive as someone else mentioned. Perhaps I have yet to reach the zen like nerd state, I must practice more. :)
Quote:Original post by SiCrane Fortran isn't dead yet, though I often wish it was. A lot of heavy number crunching libraries and projects are still done in Fortran.
Fortran2004 is pretty sweet. I would use it over C++ for many projects (if politics didn't stop me).
Well, I incriminated myself really.. got carried away ;-)
I think it is the ultimate script language and prototype tool. It's a useful companion to have around to quickly test things out. I find it much easier to use than Python, Perl etc because it is so minimal. You can write a program very quickly in scheme once you understand it, and it is much easier to understand it than any other scripting language I think. Scheme has very little baggage, most people don't care much about it, so there are not many Scheme language wars going on to distract you.
The ( ) parenthesis put people off but I honestly don't find them to be very distracting once you get the hang of it. All editors will check them for you too. And you can certainly use white space just like in C to make it more readable.
It's also the best calculator you can have on your desktop ;-) You also have far more expression than the stupid windows calculator. Need to integrate? You write some scripts in Scheme. Need to solve something symbolically? Scheme! It's a pain in the neck in C because of compiling, and C is very strict compared to Scheme.
Get PLT Scheme (Dr. Scheme) it has a very nice and friendly editor. MIT scheme is much bigger, has alot more useful stuff in it, but Edwin is kind of hard to use if you don't understand Emacs yet.
