[Fedora-packaging] Re: paragraph on shipping static numerical libs

[Axel Thimm]

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.

> >  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.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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