-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Herborn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 9:33 AM
To: 'Vincent Diepeveen'; 'Tim Cutts'
Cc: Beowulf@beowulf.org; Lux, James P
Subject: RE: [Beowulf] Stroustrup regarding multicore
Perhaps his judgment isn't "universally" objective (not influenced by
personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts), but could
very well could be objective (and his version of reality) in his little part
of the world. Being at a University I've run across more of what he said
then your particular comments on the subject.
However, that being said I would think that it is usually easier to teach a
Scientist to code, then a coder the PhD level of the science.
----
I would say that you shouldn't be teaching the Scientist to code. You should be
teaching them to write good requirements documents & test cases that someone
who is skilled at coding can use. That way, you can leverage the years of
tuning experience and down and dirty knowledge of the computational platform.
Giving the Scientist background information so that they can effectively ask
for things is another story (i.e. make them an intelligent consumer).
And, even if the Scientist does wind up coding, they'll produce better code if
they didn't just do it in a ad-hoc "let's go in and modify what 30 years of
grad students have done and see what happens".. Not that you're not going to
wind up modifying the 30 years of heritage, but at least, you'll have a clearer
picture of what, exactly, you're trying to accomplish and how you'll know that
you got there. That's always nice when you have to justify how you spent all
that money.
{This comment is given, of course, wearing my software development manager hat.
I reserve the right to hack up my own stuff, at my own risk, of course.}
Jim Lux
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