New guy

[davers007]

Hi everyone. I've been dabbling with Linux for a couple of years now and am now comfortable enough with it to actually start doing some useful things. I have Ubuntu on my home computer and openSUSE at work. I'm a materials scientist by trade but do simulations, so I am learning programming pretty quickly. Just wanted to say hello to the forum.

Cheers,
Davers

[Kieren]

Hello Davers and welcome to LF!

You job sounds exciting but what kinds of languages do you use? The scientists I know tend to use outdated versions of FORTRAN as it’s what their lectures have used and refuse to update

[davers007]

Hi Kieren,

The reason many scientists use FORTRAN is because a lot of the commercial modeling software uses it for input files and subroutines. For instance, if you want to do a finite element (FE) simulation with your own calculations at each integration point, it must be in FORTRAN. From what I've heard it's also less difficult to make programming errors because the language is fairly simple; most errors thus come more often from using bad equations.

At the moment I am using C because the code I inherited is in C. I wouldn't mind learning other languages, but there are many out there (so I don't know where to start) and I would need a good reason (because I don't have time to just dabble).

I have some ideas about a future project which would involve processing graphics obtained from a CCD camera inside an scanning electron microscope on graphics boards. Any idea what language would be best suited to do something like that?

Thanks for the welcome,

Davers

[oz]

Howdy, and welcome aboard!

[Hal343]

Welcome. I've never done that kind of programming, so can't answer, but someone will probably know something about it.

[davers007]

Hi Ozar and Hal, thanks for the greetings!

[Kieren]

Hi Kieren,
The reason many scientists use FORTRAN is because a lot of the commercial modeling software uses it for input files and subroutines. For instance, if you want to do a finite element (FE) simulation with your own calculations at each integration point, it must be in FORTRAN. From what I've heard it's also less difficult to make programming errors because the language is fairly simple; most errors thus come more often from using bad equations.

I meant more that the versions of FORTRAN they use are outdated. I think the last university my girlfriend worked for was using FORTRAN '98

I have some ideas about a future project which would involve processing graphics obtained from a CCD camera inside an scanning electron microscope on graphics boards. Any idea what language would be best suited to do something like that?

I've never done anything like that myself but I'll ask my girlfriend later to see if she has any ideas

[hansul]

Welcome to the Linux forum. I used FORTRAN 98 when I was at UNI, I had to do it to pass a module