Subject: Re: What languages will be here tomorrow...

From: Fuad Abdallah <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 1997 13:45:21 +0200 (MDT)

Dear CCL Members,

it is very interesting to note, that the discussion about the programming
languages for scientific programs only mentioned Fortran, C, C++ and
Python.

Although i do understand that everybody tries to use as much existing
code as possible i do also see many disadvantages.
From the point of Software Engineering it will become more and more
difficult to improve (or even maintain) the huge scientific software
projects. Even if C++ tries to overcome some of the problems of software
reusability, it introduces some new problems that already have been
mentioned in earlier mails to the CCL.

I do not agree that it is always important to use the language that
produces the fastest executables. Even if the choice of Fortran (or
whatever you consider to be "the fastest" programming language) would give
your executables a constant factor of execution speed advantage it could
take a _very_ long time to implement new, improved algorithms. 

The concepts underlying Fortran, C and C++ is in deed very old. Although
many of these "imperative language" have been developed over the last
years and there is a steady addition of new features, resulting in more
and more complex languages, the fundamental concept based on the computer
model designed by von Neumann, did not change.

Taking all this together, i do see a strong need for new concepts and i
think a promising new approach are the functional programming languages
like ML, Haskell, Gofer and Clean.
They offer many interesting features like higher order functions, 
polymorphism and straight forward parallelism (a _very_ important point if
you consider the fact that more and more multiprocessor systems are being
used) and allow programming on a much higher level of abstraction,
enabling the programmer the fast implementation of new algorithms.

If you are interested in FP, have a look at the FAQ:
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/Department/Staff/gmh/faq.html

best regards,
Fuad
--
Fuad Abdallah
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Zuechtungsforschung / ZWDV