Hi Roger and all,

First, some more info regarding that proposed U.S. department.

There appears to be at least one thing that we agree on. And that is the fact that the U.S. Government does not run very efficiently for a variety of reasons. The question is, “What can be done to fix that problem?” And my Web page that discusses “Departments of Science and Technology” is one possible way to fix the problem.

It appears that you and I are not thinking of the same problems that the department would try to solve. So I am planning to modify the Web page some more to make things clearer.

The main problem the department would try to deal with is the fact that important things that the U.S. and other governments should be doing are “falling into the cracks” in the international science system. Government should be trying to solve various problems. But they might not have a specific department that deals with that problem. And so it just continues endlessly.

Two obvious examples are that disastrous oil spill in the Gulf and that Japan nuclear power plant meltdown.

The physical problems or limitations that resulted in those disasters and also kept them from being quickly resolved should have been taken care of long ago by governments and private companies. But they simply got no attention until the disasters occurred.

So, that new department would try to keep track of various problems that can face U.S. citizens and also people around the world, and see that at least something was being done about them. So many problems wouldn’t simply “fall into the cracks” because no one was aware that they existed and because no one was responsible for solving or managing them.

PROJECT FOR ROGER

At this time it looks like we need to develop a programming language system that scientists and amateurs around the world can use to do various types of research.

For example, it should be able to draw a chart and let you interactively change things on the chart just by pressing a keyboard key. And the charts should work about the same no matter what computer or version of Windows was being used. TrueBasic was a nightmare for that!

Perl with Gnuplot makes this possible. And I have used it extensively over the years. But it is too complex and slow.

Since you seem to be moving towards Fortran then perhaps that language can be organized with all of the necessary libraries so that it can do those types of things.

What I am planning to do is create a Web page that discusses this type of effort. And that information will then be circulated through various language Newsgroups to see what people have to say.

Julia might be better. But we don’t know that at this point. And perhaps the Python people would be willing to get something like that working.

I am afraid that I have about given up on Perl. It could be an ideal language for this use. But it is presently too difficult to learn how to do anything new with Perl. In contrast the Python and Fortran people were so helpful that I had to politely ask them to stop providing help. I couldn’t keep up with them. The Julia people also looked like they wanted to be helpful.