CS 1073 -- Course Goals, Fall 2004

CS 1073 Introductory Programming
for Scientific Applications
History and Course Goals, Fall 2004

History of the Course: This course initially used the SAS statistical package, which is Fortran based, and emphasized scientific computations without programming from scratch. Over time the course has evolved into a straight Fortran programming course, perhaps emphasizing scientific programming. Thus the current course description is obsolete and does not match the way the course is now commonly taught.

Problems with the Course: The recent version of this course has significant problems:

Fortran is mostly an obsolete language now. It is used for huge geological calculations, and is still used for various numerical analysis and statisical calculations. Nevertheless, Fortran is no longer commonly encountered.
In most parts of the job market, a knowledge of Fortran is not remotely as good as a knowledge of a more "modern" language, such as C++ or Java, or if not one of those two, then C. It would be rare for an employer to have any interest at all in seeing "Fortran" on a resume.
11 of the 28 students in the course are apparently going to become high school mathematics teachers. Fortran will be almost completely useless for them.
The compiler available for use on machines in the classroom (and elsewhere on campus) is based on Fortran 77 (the version of the language from 1977), while the textbook is based on Fortran 90, which has a very large number of significant changes from Fortran 77. (A Fortran 90 compiler is available on the CS Department's Sun workstations, but there are not enough of these machines for students in this course to use.)

Why Use Java In This Course? I have decided to teach the course using Java for a number of reasons:

Java is by far the best choise for the future high school math teachers. At some point they may want to teach computer science as well as mathematics, and in high school this is mostly done in Java. The high school AP exam in computer science uses Java.
Java compilers and development environments are available for free for almost all types of computer systems. Several forms of Java are already on the computers in the classroom, and elsewhere on campus.
Java is the language we emphasise in our computer science program.
Java is a modern language which does look good on a resume.
Java is a fairly good language to use as a first language for learning programming.

Why Not Learn C++ or C? C++ would be another reasonable choice. Here are reasons for and against the use of C++:

C++ is particularly desirable for scientists and engineers, and C++ is very commonly used in industry. C++ is a powerful development language, not proprietary and easily ported, that leads to code that is more efficient than Java.
C++ is very complicated, and can be difficult to teach (although the same can be said for Java).
There is not the same availability of free C++ compilers as with Java.
Many parts of C++ are identical to Java, so that knowing Java, you can move on to C++ (with effort).

OK, well let's at least get to the course goals.

Course Goals
Learn the basics of the Java language. Learn the rudiments of programming, including basics such as types, expressions, loops and conditionals, functions and parameters, and arrays. Explore various scientific applications of computers. Get an introduction to object-oriented programming in Java.

CS 1073 Introductory Programming for Scientific Applications History and Course Goals, Fall 2004

CS 1073 Introductory Programming
for Scientific Applications
History and Course Goals, Fall 2004