 Well, thank you for joining us again. Again, I'm here with James and I am Chris and today I'm going to talk to you about what you did in college, which you've been graduated for a few years now But in college you majored in physics. Yeah, I majored in physics and I worked in a computational soft materials laboratory Oh, that sounds very very fancy. What what we did is well real question. Yeah, go ahead before that I mean, I've known you for years. Yeah, and when I first met you you didn't really seem to be a big computer nerd, right? Yeah, I should say um and Since then I feel like you've completely surpassed in many ways, but you've done you've done it professionally So you have more I have a hack it together just get it done where you've worked with other people But was it in college when you were working with physics and doing computer simulations? Was that when you really started getting into programming and see in particular? Yeah, you know, absolutely I I dabbled in programming before that. I think that I You know, unfortunately, I never had something to really inspire me to get really deep into it And so yeah in college working in in the laboratory was was some You know, all of a sudden I had projects that were that were interesting problems And that's why I majored in physics is the the thing I loved more than anything was solving problems Is just being able to like break something apart and see see what makes it tick, right? Right? And so, you know early on I found like one of the most interesting modern day ways to break something apart and see Outworks is is with computational physics where you have a computer actually either run simulations or compute compute answers to To to equations that are too complicated for someone to solve in a traditional sense and see is ideal for that Yeah, okay. Well, it's okay. Yeah, it's debatable, you know So a lot of people still use Fortran. Okay, which is the oldest computer language that there is I mean It's essentially assembly, but other than that in the beginning there was Fortran. I mean there is Fortran on punch cards Okay, okay. No, I've played around very little with assembly. I basically did a hello world bootloader Right. Um, but I've never touched Fortran, but I've heard you've mentioned it a few times Yeah, so so Fortran still used a lot in the scientific community Um, it has a lot of mathematical Uh resources available to it just just out of the gate, which is kind of an advantage I think uh, where C really kind of Gets used more than Fortran is probably for simulations. Again, still people use Fortran a lot for simulations, but for C you have a little bit more control over optimizing memory space and The pointer mechanism makes it very very strong way to sort of connect objects In in the type def functionality allows you to create New objects similar to the way you would in an object oriented programming language So yeah, so C is used by a lot of in C plus plus is used by a lot of Physicists for simulation. Yes, mainly definitely with working with That sort of thing physics where you're calculating you're crunching a whole bunch of numbers You probably want a binary program rather than the scripting right? Yeah, and probably the most popular The third most popular language besides those two is probably like the matlab slash octave and octaves the open source version and um, and those ones especially if if Not taking away from any of those languages But if you're working in laboratory and you just need to crunch the data from that laboratory In other words, all you're doing, you know, your instrument measured something and you want to find some some result from those measurements Uh, octave and matlab tend to work very good for that You could run simulations on that, but typically by the time you're doing simulations, you're doing C or 4-trap Sure. Now, I I remember and this has been years ago So my memory might not be quite right, but I remember one of your first real experiences with linux was probably in a class I think you said you had there was a there was a room in the basement They went down they had red hat running on all these old computers Yeah, so yeah in the physics department and you'll find this actually probably the oldest proponents of the linux operating systems Besides of course the computer science people That that historically have had to rewrite open source versions of unity systems But you know the people that unity systems or unix unit system. Sorry Unix systems, uh, open source versions But but you'll find a lot of the big proponents besides computer scientists and mathematicians were were physicists chemists other scientists Uh, that that, you know, they needed those sort of controls. They needed to have that much power and flexibility It's not least in office where you're filling out a spreadsheet or a word document You need to actually write stuff and the tools are more there in the community where that's what people do And you need to be able to I mean there and there's a lot of things that Even just linux aside unix operating systems can really specialize on a lot of things that that really gave a lot of power to you know science Programmers who are writing c programs just to be able to to fork processes and Or even to be able to pipe things You know that even the bash scripting ability it just makes it a lot easier to run things under the system um and I feel like you also told me once when you were working on those projects there was a a guy you worked with who was pretty good with bash or some sort of shell script and uh, wasn't very uh knowledgeable on c and so he wrote a bash script to calculate some numbers And then decided that it was taking forever and let it keep running and before it finished running He learned how to write a c program Ran it and it calculated numbers in the bash script and do you remember this? Yeah. Yeah No, I think even I wouldn't even say it was not good at c I think what I think the the story that was being told to me from them is When I was newer to the lab was that you know You have to figure something out and it's easy to write a bash script to figure something out Especially with awk awk is very popular To to be able to compute some things and you have to write a bash script So you write a bash script and uh, and and you're waiting for it to run But then you figure well, why don't I write a c? C script to do the same thing and since it's a lower level programming language It's closer to the source It's able to use a lot utilize the processor better more efficiently in the memory more efficiently And and apparently they were able to run it Write it and run it before the bash script finished. So, you know that that might mean something so now I'm going to defend bash a little bit just because a lot of my viewers are bash and I completely understand That a binary language like c is Um way more efficient for that sort of thing. Um, but uh, there was one time I was over here visiting you And oh, yeah, I'm in this conversation now. I know why you want to do these videos Okay. Yeah, I'm not calling you out. Okay, and I'm just um Trying to make a uh, uh, just I think I won that argument though. I think I think I think we determined When we scaled it up. I think we figured we scaled it up You said let let's take something that has a lot of words in it Yeah, and count those words and so we decided to take the old testament of the bible And you asked me to write a bash. So just from my knowledge I wrote out a bash script and you said this is we're going to put this script online and I'm I already have it up on my paste then. I'm pretty sure we found like I Okay, I'll get to your your your okay, so I wrote a bash script and it was running on your computer and we're talking like this is going to take a day 10 minutes later. It was done and you're like, wow that was a lot faster than I thought but see what's gonna be faster I sat down tweaked the program and got to run in about three minutes. Yeah, um And then your argument when you saw my code was that I was using sort I So with sort you you went and looked at the source code. Yeah, and you said it was um hashing stuff Right, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, sure. And what you were thinking I would have to write Yeah, yeah, and so your argument was well, this is written in C and my argument was Everything's written in C any any scripting language, uh python bash. I am not bashing bash. No, I know you're not. I'm not bashing C Obviously, I use bash More than I probably use C. Right. So, you know, my point though is is that you are 100% right that at C Sometimes though, there's programs like sort which is already designed to accomplish a task and I'm calling that now When we're talking about the physics, there's probably not already a program written Specifically because you're trying to do something somewhat unique. Well, let's even just talk about that the beautiful thing about Unix the Unix philosophy is you write programs That do one thing well, yes, right and I'm so very much for 99 and all bash is doing is it's it's Able to utilize how wonderfully Unix does that right? So we we have this this This function that someone wrote and and it's not supposed to be excel where it can do everything under the sun tables All it does is sort and it is written to really sort well Right and then you can pipe things to it and you can take the result and pipe it somewhere else And that's the beauty of bash and yeah unique systems. Yes. Yeah, and I want to say like I said 90 90 something percent of time I would say One goal get that done they go and that's one of the things that um I try to express to some of yours and I say this a lot and I get a lot of people arguing with me And a lot of people agreeing with me And I think that we'll probably touch on this in the next video. Maybe it'll be the topic Is that get ambushed again? No, no, no Programming is not difficult Yeah, it becomes difficult when people try to do too many things at once Oh, yeah, definitely and actually I think that we're going to end this segment here And next segment will probably be on that topic. Okay, sounds great to you. So thank you for watching Please visit films by chris.com. That's chris with a k. There should be a link in the description Thank you again james for talking to me today, and I hope that you all have a great day If you enjoy my tutorials and would like to see more Please think about contributing to my patreon account at patreon.com forward slash metal x 1000