Despite the availability of an enormous amount of general-purpose free software on the Internet, scientific software is still lacking. Numerical and other engineering software libraries for research and education have proliferated in the past, only to slow down in recent years.
As a case in point, one may google "solution of quadratic equation with complex coefficients." A public domain code in Fortran, C, or C++ can be found only in the library accompanying the book "Numerical Computation in Science and Engineeting."
A search for a user-friendly code that solves the Orr-Sommerfeld equation to produce a stability graph returns only a couple of results. Considering the fundamental importance of this equation, it is surprising that more effort has not been devoted to writing and disseminate teaching tools.
Other surprisingly lacking programs concern the solution of the Euler-Bernoulli equation for beam bending (a matlab code can be found in my book "Finite and spectral elemement methods",) a finite-difference code on a staggered grid for solving the driven-cavity problem (a matlab code can be found in my book "Fluid Dynamics: Theory, Computation, and Numerical Simulation".)
The development of free educational software for college and postgraduate training has long been left to the volunteer. It is high time the effort were supported in some meaninglful fashion.
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
Computer programmers share a thinking pattern stemming
from a central directive: all should be declared and
be well-defined; otherwise, the code will not compile
or crash.
An error message issued by
the author of grade-A code may read:
code bread: function temperature: function dial:
baking temperature not defined.
This is a beautiful, unambiguous, and explicit construct.
Similar ingenious constructs can be found in the design of xml and object-oriented languages.
"Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well. "