[krisoft]

> Apparently it is "blue collar" work to do actual programming?

Let’s not build up cultural myths from a passing conversation. Of course there are PhDs in Europe who code and code very well. There are also ones who don’t. Was the PhD even in a Computer Science related field?

And not to offend you, but many people have better things to do than talk about programing languages. Maybe the visiting PhD had more interesting topics on their mind?

[mistrial9]

transportation modelling, IIR.. he was from Spain

[lazyasciiart]

A surprising amount of math/science/engineering types still seem to consider actually programming their models and and such to be the grunt work, sometimes even handed off to someone else. Seems like a terribly inefficient way to work.

[dagw]

Seems like a terribly inefficient way to work.

Yes and no. Learning the intricacies of your particular domain as well as high performance computing is massive task. I used to work as that "someone else", and on the whole I think it was a good way to split the work. They gave me slow python/matlab code that solved a hard problem in a very clever way, and I made run in reasonable amount of time using a reasonable amount of memory etc. I will never know as much about thermodynamics as the scientist, and they don't have the time to learn the best way to make software run really fast.