Nathan Moore wrote:
> Nathan,
> I'm sure you'll get lots of very experienced responses but if I may:
> 1. Book. K&RC is the best book ever, on any subject.
> 2. Demographics. It looked to me that engineers were typically
> learning and using C (C++, C with Classes, sometimes Java) more than
> Fortran. I would have expected similar among physicists, but I
> understand that a lot of Fortan is still extant and vital. Also there
> is some convergence, ultimately it won't matter much.
But for solving a problem (as opposed to learning to get a job
programming) what about something like Matlab? It's procedural, there
are compilers (sort of), and it automatically does stuff with matrices
in sensible ways.
No site license for matlab here - I generally have my students couple
Octave: http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
After taking students through the joys of programming, I showed them how
to do masses with springs on Octave. What a difference. As Jim Lux
noted, you spend less time dealing with the vagaries of the language and
more time helping them articulate a solution (though this particular
example is bad in that you have many signs you need to correctly and
carefully account for ... sign errors are a bear in any language)
gnuplot with some sort of language (perl or fortran depending on how
long the job will run), or offer mathematica as an option.
I also like Maxima.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ maxima
Maxima 5.12.0 http://maxima.sourceforge.net
Using Lisp GNU Common Lisp (GCL) GCL 2.6.7 (aka GCL)
Distributed under the GNU Public License. See the file COPYING.
Dedicated to the memory of William Schelter.
This is a development version of Maxima. The function bug_report()
provides bug reporting information.
(%i1) integrate(1/(1+x^2),x,0,inf);
%pi
(%o1) ---
2
(%i2) fortran(%o1);
%pi/2.0E+0
(%o2) done
(%i3)
:)
I used to try to have it help simplify integrals in statistical
mechanics homework from (owie) 18 years ago.
I would certainly eschew any of the fads for "Engineering with Excel"
which make my teeth grind when I hear about it. Every time one of my
colleagues creates this incredibly elaborate spreadsheet to calculate
receiver performance (gain distribution, intermodulation, etc.) I have
to wonder how many hours were spent working around the idiosyncracies
of Excel (just to get the plot to look right, if nothing else), when
they could have spent that time learning a "real" tool to do the job.
Yes, I agree, there is no more asinine task than matrix calculations in
excel. I keep waiting for Microsoft to have competent-looking graphs be
For fun^h^h^hprofit^h^h^h^h^h^hmasochism I once did a Runge-Kutta orbit
calculator in Excel.
Yes, you can use it for such things ... but ... why would you want to?
the default when plotting x&y data. The new version it even worse than
XP excel. The plots are rendered with some sort of open GL surface so
that trend lines now look like giant ropes of licorice.
Heh... I still like Gnuplot, as you can programmatically generate input
decks for it, and have it generate png/jpg/ps/pdf from this ...
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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