Quoting Joe Landman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on Tue 20 Nov
2007 02:39:29 PM PST:
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/
Octave is nice, but.... the graphics are MUCH better in Matlab, and
there's all those toolboxes full of cool stuff (signal processing,
control systems, maps, etc.)
And, an academic license for Matlab is only $100. That's less than
the textbook likely costs. Granted Matlab isn't quite as cool as the
symbolic manipulators. It's sort of like a procedural programming
language in an interpretive/JITcompile environment with a HUGE and
useful subroutine library.
I also ran across an interesting Matlab program/application that did
*symbolic* manipulation of the matrices in linear circuit theory.
Matlab isn't the most pleasant environment for string manipulation,
and this was an amazing work of art and craft in many dimensional
arrays of characters.
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)
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
