[Fedora-packaging] Re: paragraph on shipping static numerical libs

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 09:44 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 09:34:20AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > 
> > They use Linux/Unix because "somebody told them so", they program in
> > Fortran, Cobol, Algol or Modula, because "somebody told them so", they
> > do something "this way" because they don't know better and don't "want
> > to know better".
> 
> That's a bit of oversimplification.
I've worked in such an environment for many years, I know what I am
talking about.

An anecdote: I once met an EE-professor, who, when being asked why they
were using Fortran answered: "Because our simulations are based on the
Fortran punch cards I wrote during my PhD thesis 25 years ago".
Consequently, his students and employees were programming Fortran.

>  In general scientists do coding 
> just fine but don't want to do more nor even think about it (no 
> packaging, no thoughts on system administration...).
Well, in 90% of all such cases, "their coding" goes into implementing
complex algorithms, while their programs complexity is not much
different from "hello world".

>  However there 
> are IT people working together with scientists who do system 
> administration well.

> Still the needs are specific and very different from other environments.
I can not disagree more.

These guys relation to programming / sys-administration is not much
different from that of a 14-year old kid, whose IT skills are "browsing
the web, running games, playing mp3s and using word processors", when it
had a course in "programming in C" at school, and then starts to
discover the subtleties of programming afterwards.

Ralf