[Fedora-packaging] Re: paragraph on shipping static numerical libs
Ralf Corsepius
rc040203 at freenet.de
Mon May 28 08:15:01 UTC 2007
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".
> 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.
Ralf
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