Re: A language they cannot read?
@Joe W “Good grief! I picked up Fortran pretty quickly when I used it for a project. As soon as you know a handful of languages reading and understanding them is no big deal - if the code is well written.”
They are not programmers they will not know a handful of languages. These students are probably postgraduate specialising in a field (climate science) after getting their first science degree. Modelling may only be a small of their postgraduate studies and could be the first time they have to do serious programming. So, unless they worked in Fortran before then it may not be able to pick it up quickly.
My first job out of university was working at a research institute on a government funded project. Everyone on the project except me (just a BSC in Computer and Mapping Science) had a doctorate.
Anyway, one thing I had to do was take computer models (large and small scale) that modelled nitrate concentration in the soil and turn them into modules that the system I was programming could call. Some were in C one was in Pascal and yes there were some in Fortran.
Now while the models worked not that I understood the maths elegant code they were not. The code was poorly structured no comments (who needs comments I know what it is doing said one of his model, coded in Fortran). None of them knew any language other than the one they had programmed in. The reason for this is they come through their science degrees then pick up some coding when they needed it.
Now I expect it is not as bad as that today as that was almost 30 years ago. But they will not be programmers the science they studied was not Computing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
