Reid Sweatman wrote:
Thorsten Ottosen wrote:
"Reid Sweatman" <drunkardswalk@earthlink.net> wrote in message
| Oddly enough, scientists is usually pretty | conservative folk; they like what they know.
Is that so odd? Yesterday I talked with a matematician here in Sydney
about Fortran.
He uses Fortran because it is good enough for what he is doing. It would
probably take quite some
time for him to learn C++, so why should he?
Agreed. It's the newcomers that we want to snare, before they've been indoctrinated into Fortran. New mathematicians tend to have at least some computer science training, so they will be looking for more than Fortran to write their code in. The competition will in fact be in the other direction, from languages like Ocaml.
No, no. Irony. It's a literary device. The tip-off that I was attempting to employ it is the American colloquialism in re verb number. ;)
Reid
That said, every researcher is conscious of what brings the money in. Especially in times that are tight for funding, no one wants to spend time on learning new programming languages unless it allows them something they don't know how to get from what they already know. This is not the most long-sighted view, but it is common. John