And once these people are in, they tend to moan about the state of things, about how everyone is “gatekeeping knowledge” and intentionally making software difficult to work on. No, you just lack the skills to work in this field. It would be like a pre-med trainee walking into a hospital and insisting everything is too complicated. That it all needs to match their limited understanding of how medicine works.
I’m speaking as someone without a computer science degree, but with a master’s in a different field of engineering. Software is VERY difficult, among the most difficult fields to work in, cognitively speaking. I have spent YEARS of my free time learning everything that a B.S. in computer science would provide, and still feel like I have a superficial understanding of a lot of CS topics.
If someone lacks the chops to make it, then we should either train them up or encourage them to pursue something else. Not offer them “get-rich-quick” schemes and destroy the technical rigor of the field in the process.
/rant
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Fortran and Pascal programs for selected methods are included for the reader's convenience. Although computer scientists have attacked Fortran because it does not force the programmer to write clear, structured code, no other language provides so many easily used tools for mathematical programming. Many of the newer languages suffer from an impoverished mathematical library and primitive input/output functions. Structured program control can be easily achieved in Fortran; all that is required is discipline.
