[boost] Re: Boost Mathematicians

From: John Phillips (phillips_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-06-05 14:35:25

Reid Sweatman wrote:
>>>
>>>Thorsten Ottosen wrote:
>>>
>>>>"Reid Sweatman" <drunkardswalk_at_[hidden]> 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