Floating-Point Indoctrination: Final Lecture

[Barry Shein]

From: dgh%dgh at Sun.COM (David Hough)
>Over the nearly twenty years since this lecture course was
>first presented, the software environment has gradually
>deteriorated despite that hardware has improved. The
>software deterioration may be attributable to the
>establishment of Computer Science as a separate academic
>discipline, whose graduates need have little acquaintance
>with scientific computation.

(oh c'mon, suffer me one comment)

I think this is misguided, having spent many years in the scientific
computation biz I can assure you that it is not a place where the
problem is absent. In fact, in my experience most natural scientists
seemed bored and/or suspicious when the problems were broached in
conversation. The reaction often was "oh, don't be absurd, of course
the machine [language, whatever] takes care of that?! I have work to
do and no time for this twaddle (ie. ranting of a computer
scientist.)"

What is generally absent from places where natural scientists compute
is computer scientists. The reasons are several, among them they don't
like to be sneered at for using Fortran or whatever isn't in vogue at
the moment (and on that count they are often, but not always, correct,
they're correct when it doesn't *really* make much any difference,
which is often, incorrect when they fail to see that their software
problems, eg. trying to manage records, are due to their insistence on
trying to do that sort of thing in Fortran, with dozens of overlapping
named commons and an I/O model never designed for that sort of thing
etc), an all too common arrogance that programming is just busy-work,
almost clerical in nature, and is just as well done by a young grad
student on stipend rather than paying someone a real salary to concern
themselves with the issues and finally a simple and real frustration
with a language gap, no argument, a grad student at least can talk
physics (eg) with the "customer", a skill the CS person usually is
completely lacking.

Unfortunately, this only separates the CS blame but does not exonerate
it. I would agree, as one involved in CS education, that the
curriculum does not adequately cover such issues as precision and
accuracy etc. S/he may very well leave with a respect for the issues
but probably has little actual knowledge of them. What is this due to?

Several things, as David pointed out the separation of fields may have
something to do with it. This has led to departments that are often
populated with logicians and other people of such a theoretical bent
that they have no real ability (and less interest) in teaching
something as mundane as floating point precision. Some of that can be
traced back to the relative salary levels in Academia vs Industry,
there's little to attract someone who can actually do something with a
computer into teaching. Also, let's face it, in this fast paced world
such mundane issues are boring, who wants to be so unpopular by
teaching a course in numerical analysis when they could be teaching
networking or window systems or something like that, something the
kids have actually heard of and have a hunger for, and the rarity of
applied computer scientists exacerbates that (they can usually teach
what they want.) Few universities judge the viability of a course
based upon its relevance to the subject at hand, head-counts seem so
much more objective and reflect tuition dollars so much better...

Well, that's my cynical 2c.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University