Fortran And Physics

An interesting entry got me thinking about hard science and low-level programming languages such as C and Fortran. Do the two fields really mesh well together? As the entry suggests, they do not. Initially, back when Fortran was in it's prime, it would make sense for Physicists to use a language such as Fortran to compute astonishingly complex mathematics very fast. But back then, there really any alternative. This clearly isn't the case today.

It seems that undergraduates in the hard sciences are still taught the Fortran programming language in an introductory programming course. Computer science students are also taught Fortran. I think the latter may make sense and the former not so much. In the end, it really comes down to how the student will benefit in the future. At least in the world of academia.

For computer science students to have a thorough understanding of low-level programming concepts is beneficial. And, there is only one way this insight is gained. Through the painstaking process of learning a language such as Fortran inside and out.

Physicists, however, may not share the same benefit as would computer scientists years after having learned such a language. I think this makes sense. Why would physicists want to concern themselves with low-level software details when the low-level math problem at hand is probably much more interesting to them. Would a software developer be overly pleased to hear that he has to write a web browser from scratch in order to build a web application? Not likely.

I think that programming languages are sophisticated enough these days to allow for the scientists in other fields to focus on what matters to them. Leave the low-level software to the computer scientists. Languages such as Python are there for physicists to use as a result of computer scientists taking care of the low-level details. All parties are much happier in this scenario.