I've been following math software for quite a while, mainly the free or open source packages. Gnuplot naturally is one of the standards, surviving ages and always being handy. Ditto for R, the statistics package .. bound to be around forever, I hope. Octave, a matlab based system, has just released its latest, version 2.9.7.
Well, every now and again I go visit all these sites to see what's up. A somewhat obscure site/package I follow is "J", an APL descendent which takes a symbolic-linguistic approach to math software. It is very, very terse and has some interesting parsing stunts that promote very concise composition of functions. A bit odd, just as APL was, but no longer requires special keyboards. It remains matrix oriented although its syntax definitely gets close to math in terms of brevity. Well, I see they've spiffed up their site, so I hope that means more activity. http://www.jsoftware.com/ Roger Hui, who wrote J with Ken, and Eric Iverson, Ken's son, are active on the site. Ken passed away a few years ago. JSoftware is a consultancy which uses J and thus helps pay to have it remain freely available. Anyway, just wanted to pass on the news that the J community is becoming more active and well established. I'd LOVE it if someone truly got their mind around J and could help the rest of us do the same! Pretty steep learning curve. -- Owen Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
