PS.
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg29509] PS.
- From: "Orestis Vantzos" <atelesforos at hotmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 01:46:51 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: National Technical University of Athens, Greece
- References: <9guo4t$nt8$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
PS. I have nothing against people who use Fortran,OK? I just think it should be dead and buried by now...that would make my life as a (young) mathematician much,much easier.. Orestis "Orestis Vantzos" <atelesforos at hotmail.com> wrote in message news:9guo4t$nt8$1 at smc.vnet.net... > Many people post to this group with original ideas, some feasible, some not, > some interesing, some not. Well, in any case original. It takes some mental > discipline for the advanced users (pardon me the vanity to include myself) > to really think about what the poor newbie says. And I am not talking about > the posts of the form "I have a problem, bla bla bla..." or "My Mathematica > has a bug, bla bla bla...", I am talking about the "Wouldn't it be > nice/interesting/whatever, to do bla,bla,bla...". Better alternatives are > ever so obvious, implementation weaknesses can be pointed immediately - > basically the first impression is usually "what is this guy talking about?" > Mathematica is so vast and versatile, that I think we don't have yet a full > grasp of its possibilities. So when people think of a weird way to do > something and they post it in the best Mathematica implementation they can > think of (which is probably not that good- Mathematica has a bitch of a > learning curve), we beat each other to the keyboard to provide our code, > often in the form of "the right code". Some among us even beat the ambitious > newbie into pulp, rushing to show him just how pointless and reduntant his > approach is. A clear point is made: "we don't need your thoughts, we have > everything solved". > Ponder this my fellow "Mathematica Gurus": > A weird mathematician walks into a programmer's office and starts talking > about a program with symbolic capabilities, that will provide a front-end > with formitable typesetting and graphic features and will be based on > functional and rule-based programming. > The programmer listens to all this and says: > "Your thoughts are foolish- we have fortran,C,linpack,whatever for > mathematics and as for typesetting you have LaTeX And who would program with > RULES?! All the major software engineering projects are procedural/object > oriented. You don't need it, it can't be done, it would be too slow, there > are other programs that do the same thing, and so on and so on..." > You get the picture, I suppose...originality IS immature; there is no other > way. It is not a local maximum, my friends - it is a departure from local > maxima in search of greener pastures. So when you encounter it, pointing to > your local max won't help ;-) > Handle it with care please...if some people didn't pursuit their "foolish" > dreams, we would all be talking in the FORTRAN2K forum now. > Orestis Vantzos > > > >