Re: CCL:Object-oriented means for computational chemistry programming

 > >- C is no more OO than Fortran, but it doesn't have most of Fortran's
 > >  most severe problems. But Fortran-90 is no worse than C, and in some
 > >  respects better.
 >
 > i.e. Fortran can be OO too.
 That's not what I wrote, and according to any accepted definition it's wrong.
 > A quote by a distinguished scientist that I recall from a scientific
 > meeting about 10 years ago:
 >
 > "I don't know what type of programming language scientists will be
 using in
 > the next millenium, but it will be CALLED Fortran"
 >
 > i.e. Fortran will evolve over time to incorporate newly desired features
 Maybe. But will it be fast enough? Fortran-90 finally offered features
 that have been around in other languages for 20 years. And Fortran-90
 is far from generally accepted; you can't even expect every scientist
 to have access to a Fortran-90 compiler yet.
 > >Scientists should also have a closer look at high-level languages.
 > >They make development and testing substantially easier by taking care
 > >of much detail automatically. Of course that comes at a price in terms
 > >of speed, but the majority of a typical scientific program is *not*
 > >time-critical. The CPU intensive parts are specific subroutines that
 > >can still be implemented in a low-level language.
 >
 > e.g. a Visual Basic front-end with Fortran or C .DLL's
 The world is larger than Windows! Visual Basic is a language available
 on one operating system and from one vendor only. That doesn't make
 sense for a community which jumps at the latest available supercomputers
 as soon as they are available. Ever seen Visual Basic on a parallel
 machine?
 > No slight against Python, but we all remember the following historical
 > sequence:
 >
 > Algol  vs Fortran (1960's)
 > PL1    vs Fortran (1970's)
 > Pascal vs Fortran (1980's)
 >
 > and now, it's
 >
 > C      vs Fortran
 >
 > On the left-hand side, it has usually been CS (computer-science) types.  On
 > the RH side, it has usually been scientists/engineers.
 But the "left-hand side" has shown steady improvement, while the
 right-hand side has merely stressed compatibility.
 I am not saying that Fortran will disappear soon, but it will become
 one among several languages used in science and engineering. There is
 already a clear trend towards increased use of C and C++, which has
 never happened with Algol or Pascal.
 Instead of keeping up the battle between "CS types" and
 "scientists",
 maybe it's time to start working together. The CS types have made
 a lot of progress in software engineering during the last decades,
 and scientists are about the only ones who seem to be determined to
 ignore that.
 --
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 Konrad Hinsen                          | E-Mail: hinsen { *at * } ibs.ibs.fr
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