[time-nuts] Software

[Jim Palfreyman]

Interesting read.

I've been programming since the mid 70's (started with a 2650 and TI59).
Graduated in Computer Science and mathematics in 1984, did Honours in
Computer Science in 1985.

Fast forward decades and I completed a Masters in Astrophysics and a Ph.D.
in astrophysics as well.

Hate Fortran and Cobol, but can program in 15+ languages and am especially
good at C.

But, here's something interesting. I picked up R during my Ph.D.

I'm now paid professionally to program in R.

R is *different*. Every variable is a vector. Even if it's a million rows,
a billion rows - that's fine. You have to think differently. Despite all my
experience, this is now one of my favourite languages.

Statisticians embraced R decades ago. Every statistical test is freely
available. Need to do Allan variance? It's done. Need to do a Lomb-Scargle
periodogram? Done. Combine that with publication quality plots as well.

I think time-nuts should have a serious look at this language. It's
available on all platforms for free. RStudio is what you need to look for.

Jim

On Wed, 3 Oct 2018 at 19:19, ew via time-nuts <time-nuts at lists.febo.com>
wrote:

> In the seventies at TI most software was done in the Equipment Group and
> they did super stuff.We send emails globally and when I traveled I did it
> with a Silent 700. Did performance reviews from Norway using rubber cups
> and phone handset.Military group was an other story.. Lost our shirt on GPS
> because we underestimated the software part 300K code. Was a wake up call
> and I was asked to set up a department strictly for code development. Did
> focus on management. Never in my professional life had an 8 to 5 job. Just
> like Rick, Fortran 50 years ago and focus on the job at hand. Most my
> professional life was ion management.  After retirement fortunate to meet
> Brook Shera and Richard Mc Corkle and still looking for team members to
> fill their void.We have some exciting projectsBert Kehren
>
> In a message dated 10/2/2018 11:40:49 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> hmurray at megapathdsl.net writes:
>
>
> richard at karlquist.com said:> At least for me. I took 1 course in Fortran
> 50 years ago, and that was the> extent of my software education. During my
> whole career, I have too busy> being well paid to design hardware, to have
> any time left over to learn> software.  After Fortran was over, there was
> the Pascal fad, then the C fad,> etc, now I guess Python is the latest.
> Never got involved in any of that.
> Interesting.
> All the hardware people I've worked with have been reasonably happy
> working on software.  That may be more common in the digital world.
> As an example, most people write PAL code as logic equations rather than
> schematics.
> It would be interesting to compare the costs of hardware vs software for a
> big chip project over time.
>
>
> -- These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
>
>
>
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