C sharp vs Fortran

mohammed alterawi

i am new to programming and it is required as part of my degree to develop a micro simulation tool to model traffic in 2d with all the interaction (with lots of engineering calculations). i have been told that fortran is the engineering programming language that is advised but it is very poor in graphics. another suggestions is to use C sharp.

i wanted to check if C sharp is easy enough for a beginner to learn and would it be capable of developing that type of micro simulation models?

thanks

4 Replies

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Sam Hobbs15y ago
I don't know everything that your project requires. If someone were to suggest something easy to learn, then you will likely say that it cannot do everything that you need to do and you will likely be correct. So the definition of easy is difficult to define.

Your project sounds like a challenge in any language. You have both graphics and a graphics UI to do.

You can use Microsoft Expression to make a UI for Silverlight and then there would be less UI coding to do. Right? Don't ask me how to do that; I need to learn. Mahesh and many other members here can help.
Mahesh Chand15y ago
Sam is correct.

C# is very easy to learn. We have some very easy-to-read-easy-to-understand books.

Start from here:
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Beginners/
mohammed alterawi15y ago
Thanks Sam. but as a beginer, itis a difficult choice for me to pick a language to start as i do not have any idea on how programming works.just wondering if C sharp is simple enough for me tp start with?
Sam Hobbs15y ago
Yes C# would be good. Note however that there is no graphics capability in the C# language. However C# is used for many GUI and graphics programs. That is because we can use graphics libraries in C#. So saying that Fortran is "very poor in graphics" is misleading.

Fortran is the first computer language I learned. That was about 40 years ago. I assume it has been improved since then but I have not heard of it being object-oriented with classes and things like that. Object-oreinted is an important feature to look for.

You should consider using Silverlight. It is a type of C# program. If you use Silverlight then your program can be easily ported to many computers, including Linux computers, Android phones and tablets and iPhones and iPads.

People unfamiliar with .Net will say that it is not good for a lot of calculations since it uses MSIL that is inerpreted at execution time. Actually MSIL is converted to machine-code at execution (once per execution) and that machine code is re-used during execution. If you search the internet you can find performance comparisons. You could try writing a couple of simple programs (one program in each of the two languages) that do some heavy calcualtions so you can do a performance comparison for yourself.