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Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?

Quarto Academic Website Template adapted by Dr. Gang He

While both issues are equally important to address, I’ll focus on the first one: students who are willing to put the effort into learning the subject but have difficulties transforming the mathematical algorithm into an actionnable piece of code. Clear delineation of the constructs: at least during the first few weeks, having to rely only on visual clues to identify where does a loop ends in Python seems to be quite complicated for a non-negligible fraction of the students I have. Fortran is good at one thing: enabling computational scientists and engineers to write high-performing mathematical models without all the intricacies of equally peformant but more CS-oriented languages such as C or C++.

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