On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 11:47 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 10:15:01AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 09:44 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 09:34:20AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
They use Linux/Unix because "somebody told them so", they program in Fortran, Cobol, Algol or Modula, because "somebody told them so", they do something "this way" because they don't know better and don't "want to know better".
That's a bit of oversimplification.
I've worked in such an environment for many years, I know what I am talking about.
An anecdote: I once met an EE-professor, who, when being asked why they were using Fortran answered: "Because our simulations are based on the Fortran punch cards I wrote during my PhD thesis 25 years ago". Consequently, his students and employees were programming Fortran.
In general scientists do coding just fine but don't want to do more nor even think about it (no packaging, no thoughts on system administration...).
Well, in 90% of all such cases, "their coding" goes into implementing complex algorithms, while their programs complexity is not much different from "hello world".
This sounds quite arrogant.
Feel free to think what you want - These number cruncher guys apps condense down to a
READ STDIN CALL ALGORITHM PRINT STDOUT
Their typical usage:
./myapp < inputdata >output ... wait <couple of days> ... lpr output
However there are IT people working together with scientists who do system administration well.
Still the needs are specific and very different from other environments.
I can not disagree more.
These guys relation to programming / sys-administration is not much different from that of a 14-year old kid, whose IT skills are "browsing the web, running games, playing mp3s and using word processors", when it had a course in "programming in C" at school, and then starts to discover the subtleties of programming afterwards.
And in their spare time they invented the web including the first implementation of web servers and clients.
May-be some of them ... The others were busy keeping their machines hot.
Ralf