🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9602120100.AA23318@ues5.cern.ch>, Dan Pop <Dan.Pop@cern.ch> wrote:

    davis@adrs1.dseg.ti.com (Tom L. Davis) writes:
    
    >Actually, the best way to do scientific or engineering problems is to use
    >commerical apps like Matlab. Your productivity will increase by about a
    >factor of 10. 
    
    One of the best jokes I read in this newsgroup for a long time.

It wasn't meant as a joke, Don. Do you even know what Matlab is? As an
engineer who has written thousands of lines of Fortran (long ago) and C in
pursuit of answers to engineering problems, I assure you that Matlab is
far superior. 
   
    Try to ask the people who simulate particle physics experiments or
    process seismical data or do any other kind of serious scientific or 
    engineering programming what do they think about the productivity increase
    factor of Matlab for their work.

Okay, let's ask them. Why don't you post this bullshit over in
comp.soft-sys.matlab and see what they think?

Very specialized, government funded, programs such as weather prediction
and particle physics may be be able to afford huge programs written in C
or Fortran. But I question the cost/benefit ratio of this approach. If I
were responsible for a project like this, I would direct that Matlab be
used as the front-end and that a few specialized functions be written as
MEX (DDL) files. This approach gives the engineer or scientist a lot of
flexibility to investigate various aspects of the problem without
submitting special requests to the software group.

    You know, not all scientists and engineers have to deal exclusively with
    toy problems.

Just what is your definition of a toy problem? I suppose the Falcon
project is an example of scientists and engineers dealing exclusively with
toy problems. I doubt that you will, but you can further your education by
reading:

http://www.csrd.uiuc.edu/falcon/falcon.html

Then tell us that the object of this project is the solution of toy problems.

    Dan
    -- 
    Dan Pop
    CERN, CN Division
    Email: danpop@mail.cern.ch 
    Mail:  CERN - PPE, Bat. 31 R-004, CH-1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland


What on earth warrants this kind of post? Does anybody understand the
workings of Mr. Pop's mind? I can assure you that I don't. 


Tom