Should Undergraduates Be Taught Fortran? 794
Mike Croucher writes "Despite the fact that it is over 40 years old, Fortran is still taught at many Universities to students of Physics, Chemistry, Engineering and more as their first ever formal introduction to programming. According to this article that shouldn't be happening anymore, since there are much better alternatives, such as Python, that would serve a physical science undergraduate much better. There may come a time in some researchers' lives where they need Fortran, but this time isn't in 'programming for chemists 101.' What do people in the Slashdot community think?"
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Python is hard too (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't as hard to write fast python code as fortran code? When you're paying large money for supercomputer time, your multi-day molecular dynamics simulations better run quickly.
Don't fear modern languages (Score:3, Interesting)
I work at a university research lab and Fortran is still very much present. If nothing else, students need to be able to work with legacy code. I agree, however, that new projects should make use of more modern languages. Special consideration should be given to functional programming which naturally fits many science problems and is easily parallelizable due to its "no side effects" philosophy.
Still going to be around for a while (Score:2, Interesting)
In my opinion, yes. I am an undergrad Physics student (senior) and had my first contact with Fortran in my third semester, in a course called Computational Physics I. We learned the basics of Fortran 77/90 and how to solve some numerical problems using it. We also simulated some interesting problems that amazes undergrad students such as chaotic oscillators, Magnus effect in action and a few other simple yet curious systems. I had already some programming experience, but most other students didn't. They got it quite quickly and I think this is due Fortran's simplicity.
Even if you are never going to use Fortran in your own projects, you will stumble on it now and then if you are going seriously into applied and theoretical research field. NASA, for example, has tons of production code written in Fortran and even new codes are written on it. Many many Physics and Chemistry groups around the world have their most important codes in Fortran, and sometimes they use clever hacks to make the code faster, so a minimum understanding of it is necessary. I work with a Computational Chemistry group and much of the code they still develop, even for new applications, is Fortran. It is good and solid code, they are very experienced on it, and they are not willing to change to another technology so easily.
As a first language I don't know if Fortran is the best, maybe Python or Java would be my choice in this case, but it is definitely worth learning.
Re:While there may be "newer" languages (Score:5, Interesting)
Use both. I used Fortran to create some python modules at my last job, and it was dead easy. Take a look at this [cens.ioc.ee].
Re:Oh come on. (Score:5, Interesting)
but for math geeks FORTRAN is probably the easiest language to get from pencil-n-paper to computer. Math functions in FORTRAN translate nicely from their paper counter parts. If you can do math and "show your work", or punch numbers in a calculator, you're 2/3 of the way to a FORTRAN command line program.
I don't think it's a useful first language anymore. Something like Python would be more useful "out of college". FORTRAN is really easy to pick up later anyway as it's "old fashioned" and line numbered based. I'd think the biggest problem teaching the class now would be getting students to take it seriously because it's a much older way of thinking about programs from our modern OOP languages.
More FORTRAN please?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh come on. (Score:2, Interesting)
Mock if you will, but when it comes to manipulating and moving massive amounts of data and maintaining the application, nothing beats COBOL.
Re:Oh come on. (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, even the creator of Fortran said "actually, that was a shit idea, we should all ignore it and use functional programming instead" in this paper [stanford.edu].
Re:Agreed, but engineers still use Fortran (Score:3, Interesting)
As for Python, I've never used it, but I've heard it's basically pseudo-code. If Python isn't likely to be used by the students in a real job, I don't see why you'd teach it to them. It makes sense to use for an introductory CS course with the intention of then rapidly teaching students Java or C or something, but if one class is all students will have to prepare them for when an employer asks them to write up a quick program, I'd give them a full immersion with the 'real thing'. In my Matlab courses you have the whole array from students that could just as well be CS majors to those who never feel comfortable with programming. If you teach them Python, only to tell them anything they'd do at work would be more complicated, the latter half of the students would never feel ready to program on the job.
Re:Oh come on. (Score:4, Interesting)
but for math geeks FORTRAN is probably the easiest language to get from pencil-n-paper to computer. Math functions in FORTRAN translate nicely from their paper counter parts. If you can do math and "show your work", or punch numbers in a calculator, you're 2/3 of the way to a FORTRAN command line program.
Yes, but with a good functional language like Haskell, you're 9/10 of the way there, not 2/3.
Re:While there may be "newer" languages (Score:3, Interesting)
So you get best of both worlds, I think Python is a better introductory programming language.
Re:How would you learn? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, Fortran has changed quite a bit in the last two decades. The Fortran 90, Fortran 95, and Fortran 2003 [wikipedia.org] standards have come out during that time. They added quite a number of major features, such as free-form source code, recursive procedures, operator overloading, dynamic memory allocation, and object-oriented programming. The Fortran of 2009 is not like the Fortran of 1989 at all.
Re:Oh come on. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh come on. (Score:3, Interesting)
Dude... (Score:3, Interesting)
... You're WAY behind the times.
I got a buddy who is an astrophysicist and worked at NASA, and he tells me his department ditched FORTRAN years ago in favor of Python+Numeric.
I hear you about the need for badass number crunching tools. It's your assumption that only FORTRAN fits that particular bill which is erroneous.
Not to say that FORTRAN doesn't have its use. It's just that other tools have since become better at some of those.
Python Numeric homepage [scipy.org]. Check it out.
Fortran is analogous to hazing (Score:4, Interesting)
The Elders feel that if they had to go through it, so do the young'uns gol durn it!
Seriously, though - as far as I know, Fortran has always been the language of those humonguous numerical models because of its optimizations with regard to array handling. I think it makes perfect sense as a first (or second) language for science majors. However I imagine the person asking this question is likely one of the young'uns being forced to learn it; and that person doesn't really have the perspective as to *why* this is so. After all, he's been hacking around in C and Python for years - they're in his comfort zone and have been good enough for the sorts of things he's been dealing with.
Python (and C, and Fortran) (Score:3, Interesting)
Just like it's good to know more than one spoken language, it's good to know more than one programming language. It's a mistake to think one programming language fits all needs. That said, it can also be helpful to know one really well, and others enough to convert them into your primary language. For me, Python fills that role very adequately, and I would highly recommend it be a part (read: part) of the undergraduate programming curriculum.
Re:I still use Fortran for sciantific calculations (Score:3, Interesting)
My first engineering class after leaving the Marine Corps in '86 was a 3 credit hour class that met twice a week. The first class each week focused on engineering graphics (drafting), the second was Fortran 77 programming.
The computers in the lab were, I believe, 286 based Epson machines with dual 5.25" drives, running MS-DOS. As an added bonus our "development environment" as you say now, was edlin!
At that time I had no personal experience with computers. I didn't know the difference between the OS, the text editor, and the compiler. Yet I had no problems with picking up the concepts and learning how to use both the language and a general use computer. I guess it was unofficially a trial by fire computer literacy class too.
Since then I've taught myself enough of a couple of different programming languages that I needed in the course of my work. Back in the day Lisp was the daddy for customizing and automating AutoCAD!
Re:Python? (Score:3, Interesting)
That was my thought. An general purpose, interrupted scripting language for scientific computing? Say what? I've never seen anyone do any sort of scientific research programming with Python, unless it was a control script or GUI interface to something written in Fortran or a C derivative. What's the point of running on the kind of huge multi-CPU systems they use for scientific modeling, if you're going to use a an interrupted language?
Re:How would you learn? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh come on. (Score:5, Interesting)
Trust me, while you may wish you were learning how to write applications in the latest pop language during undergrad, the rest of the world wishes you had been taught computer language theory, set theory, data analysis by inference, proper documentation of your code, the 'non-coding' aspects of any number of different SDLC lifecycles, complete code coverage testing approaches, the interaction between software and the machine (where the machine is the network of machines, and the rest of the software running on those machines) and critical thought / problem solving during your undergrad years.
Your disdain for COBOL, FORTRAN, and Pascal show exactly why it's a bad idea to teach a single 'current' language and spend four years focusing on all the APIs and subtle language quirks - languages come and go. Entire platforms come and go. And yet the same people adapt over time (if they are good) and continue to implement strong software engineering principles in whatever comes along to replace those obsolete technologies.
Perhaps during those classes you weren't supposed to be focusing on the medium (the language) and rather be focusing on the lesson (data structures, analysis of algorithms, queue theory, set theory, or the one that has caused the world the most problems - handling every input that could possibly be handed to a routine.)
All of the above can be taught in any language, including one made up by the professor (RIP Edgar Dykstra.)
Since I'm on both sides of the fence (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok here goes:
Should science undergraduates be taught Fortran? Yes
Should it be the FIRST language, NO, not any more
So much of science, especially physics, is done on computers now - as both a software engineer and someone transitioning into Physics I ran into many people that had severe problems learning FORTRAN and applying it to problems. I really feel science students should have a couple of general courses in programming in C before moving on to other languages or even programming classes specific to their science. Here's the reasoning:
A) Science students need to learn programming basics away from the pressure of also learning within their science field at the same time - if your learning the science at the same time, the actual basic programming concepts get lost and muddied with the science being learned.
B) It can allow a science major to learn the concepts of programming in a general purpose language without muddying it with a lot of OS specific, library specific, attitude specific usage (aside from the compiler use)
C) There is a C compiler on almost every system you will most likely use in your lifetime as a scientist
D) C has enough structure to be "readable", but doesn't have so many constraints that it has problems being fast
E) C syntax is the basis for many other programming languages including Python and Java (both of which are heavily used in science as well)
and finally if a science major has a good understanding of programming concepts they can know what to look for when they're learning a new language (whatever it might be) - they will know that they have to learn the syntax for control structures in the new language (for, while, if, etc) as well know they'll have to find out more esoteric language specific concepts like how do I create functions and libraries? How do I use them?
ALL THAT being said, yes FORTRAN is a critical language to know with the sciences, because of the availability of libraries. HOWEVER, many of those libraries are now available in other languages and/or can be called from a different language via an abstraction (a concept that would be taught in a more general computing course)
Engineers use Numerical Methods, not OOP (Score:2, Interesting)
It doesn't matter what language Engineers and physicists learn as undergrads, the language isn't what matters. It's the numerical methods that matter.
In fact, I think it's good that they learn FORTRAN because so much of the code they'll work with in industry is written in FORTRAN.
In my first programming class we spent the vast majority of the time learning numerical methods like taylor expansions and how to write them. In the very last few lectures we talked about what OOP did one homework assignment where we wrote and used a class. This was the right way to go because for an engineer, because the mathematics are far more important than the structure.
I've seen aerodynamic, structural, and acoustic calculations where the mathematics make your head spin, but it only takes two or three functions to write the numerical method to solve the equations. This is the kind of program engineers need to be good at.
Re:So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you're missing the point.
See, the point is not to teach all students FORTRAN (or Matlab, or whatever). The point is to teach it to those who might actually use it.
RTFS--the author was asking what language NON-CS people should be learning. For example, I was an engineering major (aerospace). Teaching me Java or php would be absolutely useless, because I am never going to use those in the real world. Matlab and FORTRAN are quite fine, though, because there's a decent chance that I would wind up using them later on in my career.
(Of course, at the time, GT made everyone take Scheme, which was completely pointless for about 80% of the student body... I would have much rather learned Matlab properly than try to figure it out on the fly later)
Re:Python? (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing that Python doesn't teach is static typing. I'd say having 2 languages (one static typing, one dynamic) and talking about the advantages of both. Hell, you could even use Boo as the statically typed language, which is very close to Python.
Re:Python? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh come on. (Score:3, Interesting)
But one aim should be to make tools that will serve skilled professionals--not to lower the level of expressiveness to serve people who can hardly understand the problems, let alone express solutions.
It's ironic to me that this came from the inventor of C++, IMHO one of the least expressive languages around. I spend most of my time in C{,++} explaining the means to an end, but most of my time in Python telling it what that end is.
For example, I have a list of values (int, float, string, or whatever else) and I want to double each of them. A typical Python expression would be list2 = [item * 2 for item in list1]. The C++ equivalent would involve explicitly stating what list2 will be, how to iterate across list1, and that the items might be of different types. I have better things to do with my programming time than to hold the compiler's hand and spell out every single detail.
Fortran is very important (Score:2, Interesting)
Fortran is very important in the world of modelling and high speed computation. When I was an undergrad Fortran was taught for the physical sciences but the computer science dept refused to teach it so it was being taught by some geophysical modellers. I'm not sure that the university even offers Fortran anymore.
However, frustrated by that, the dept of physics and astronomy now has two courses in computational physics (both in Fortran) taught by modellers from the department. They deal with real world issues (well, real world modelling issues when applied to a spherical cow right?). Only one course is mandatory but both courses are very popular.
For myself, I use several modelling programs that are purely Fortran that I've had problems dealing with. I'm glad I did take a bit of Fortran though I am much more fluent in other languages these days. In fact my wife, in the private sector, has proprietary software that they use for modelling digital elevations and gravity fluctuation that is written purely in Fortran as well - simply for speed. Until someone invents a real quantum computer, I don't think Fortran in the physical sciences is going anywhere.
Legacy code vs new rewrite (Score:2, Interesting)
Lets say that you are working on a project to evaluate the effects of theoretical gravity waves through a nebulae. You have a choice
And oh, you have to publish results in 2 months in order to get your next NSF grant.
Yes, the new code might be all object orienty, and you can use the latest IDE to develop in, and you can hire a bunch of fresh young (cheap) grad students that are familiar with the latest python, perl, C#, etc. development and they can bang out thousands of lines of code a day. But are you really really sure that that freshly written eigenvalue routine produces the correct result? Has that new compiler been tested on the super-computer you have limited access to, can it even take advantage of all the power of that system?
I'm not saying that FORTRAN compilers are not bug free, but I suspect that the chances of finding a basic compiler or runtime library bug is lower in FORTRAN then in say Perl 6.
A couple of years ago my son spent some time doing some intern coding work for a private atmospheric research group. The group was/is doing bleeding edge research. My son was helping out one of the researchers in updating code that handled 2D models to 3D models. All the code was in FORTRAN and there was no desire to move away from it.
Re:Oh come on. (Score:3, Interesting)
We aren't talking about computer science students here. This is about teaching a useful tool to other disciplines. Physicists, for example, don't need to learn about pointer arithmetic and computer architectures to use programming as a useful tool. They are working at the level of mathematics, with high level concepts.
And Python is one of the better languages for that. They probably wouldn't need anything else for a long time.
The situation right now is that if they aren't learning Fortran, then they are probably learning Matlab, which, frankly, seriously sucks.
Re:PYTHON???? (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with you in principle. However, do engineers really need to understand the intricacies of ZF set theory and peano axioms to formulate and solve a differential equation? What are considered fundamentals for a given topic really depends on how you intend to use it (in a practical sense, at least). People only have limited times, and limited brains, and while it would be nice to understand _everything_ from the ground up, and first principles, sometimes you have to settle for just knowing how to effectively use a tool and focus on your own area of expertise.
Re:Oh come on. (Score:2, Interesting)
Amusing post.
Things are changing pretty rapidly now. Please try to keep up.
Most high school students interested in science or engineering careers learn a bit of some programming language in the same way they learn a bit about sex: from each other, Typically in a guy's basement on his family's old Win98 or WinXP computer, rather than in the back seat of Mom's car... but the kind of fooling around is the similar.
The scripting languages are easy to come by. Firefox with Firebug and a foss text editor like Notepad++ make an excellent Javascript development environment. Heck, for the cost of a dozen good condoms and a visit to Portable Apps [portableapps.com] a geek-thinking high schooler can put an entire development package, complete with web server and database, on a 2 GB stick and have huge amounts of room for code monkey play. How could any kid interested in science or engineering resist this? And it is SO much easier than finding someone who would be interested in exploring the intended use of the condoms...
So no, I'm pretty sure parent post is wrong. That is, I doubt very much that most of the college freshmen in any of the technical schools today are programming virgins. The majority of high school students may still be virgins wrt programming experience... but those are not the ones who apply to, and get accepted into, technical schools.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh come on. (Score:1, Interesting)
It's funny that you should cite that paper. When Backus said "functional programming", he didn't mean Haskell. Rather, he was referring to a style of programming where everything (even numbers) are functions, and complex functions are created solely by composing other functions. In other words, there are no variables.
In my experience, most people have a much easier time understanding abstract concepts when they are given examples. A function declaration in a language like Haskell is, essentially, an example; i.e. "if you call this function in this way, you'll get this output". If you have no variables, then you have no examples.
Backus was undoubtedly a genius -- his name is in Backus-Naur Form, among other things -- but there's a reason that no one uses the language he described in that paper.
Re:Oh come on. (Score:3, Interesting)
Rather, he was referring to a style of programming where everything (even numbers) are functions, and complex functions are created solely by composing other functions. In other words, there are no variables.
Yes, he meant lambda calculus based languages... Like Haskell, in fact, Haskell is one of the most heavily lambda calculus based languages.
but there's a reason that no one uses the language he described in that paper.
Yes, because the language he describes there is the assembly code of functional programming. There's similarly a reason why people don't (usually) use asm.