Subject: Re: CCL:Re: Linux vs WindowsNT vs Windows95

From: Leif Laaksonen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 1998 10:37:17 +0200

Hi,

I could not resist putting in my own opinion here... I think Peter Shenkin
in his message in this "Linux vs WindowsNT vs Windows95" discussion was
extremely good. We all should see this as new advantages in computational
chemistry. The development will not stop. We old ones have seen MVS, TSO,
JCL, VMS, Univac OS and so on. I can still remember the time when Unix
replaced VMS and people where worried about the change. It's the science
that matters after all. We, as clever people can always learn new OS, when
it's needed. What would be more interesting to discuss is the changing
role of computational chemistry. Some 20 years ago we (almost) only had
quantum chemistry. Then we got statistical mechanics and molecular
dynamics. Now we have extensive databases and data mining. The change has
been from creating new data to combining available data to information. I
think the interesting things are here not in the trivial OS questions. As
I look at all this as an "outsider" I think the computational chemists are
extremely introvert people. People mostly think what they can do on their
own machine while they should more think what they could do in
collaboration with other. As I have already some times pointed out not too
much computationally interesting is happening in the computational
chemistry (quantum chemistry) field. Just have a look at all the
collaborative projects going on the in the biochemistry field where they
don't spend too much time in discussion of small trivial details but
spend their time and effort do things, independent of OS or hardware.

But back to Jan's request. I hope Jan we can meet some day because I
firmly believe that Win NT and the Microsoft Visual Studio environment is
a far much better development platform for scientific applications than
anything available on Unix. This does not mean that my code would be
Windows specific! It runs as such also on Unix. I do only part time
programming and I would never be able to create this much code on the Unix
platform, using the Unix tools, as I can now do with my Windows PC using
the Visual Studio product. I'm mostly using C/C++, Digital Visual Fortran,
Tcl/Tk and some other bits and pieces. I would never go back to the Unix
tools again! 

On Wed, 30 Dec 1998, Jan Labanowski wrote:
> 
> The problem from my perspective is threefold, and it really does not matter
> that UNIX is a better computational environment for science (you may
> disagree, if you are a user, and do not actually develop software. This is
> my perspective -- I hope I will meet some day a programmer who thinks
> that Windows is a better development platform for scientific applications
> than UNIX).

Regards,

-leif laaksonen

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