On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 10:54 PM, dsimcha <[email protected]> wrote: > == Quote from Lars Kyllingstad ([email protected])'s article > I think you're definitely onto something. My other problem with Matlab, R, > etc. > besides that they're slow is that they're _too_ domain specific. They're very > good at what they're good at, but the minute you try to do any more general > purpose programming with them the deficiencies become very obvious.
You should check out NumPy/SciPy. That's exactly their mantra. All the flexibility and ease of Matlab/R, etc. BUT backed by a real, solid general purpose language. > A lot of > engineers I know try to use Matlab as a general purpose language b/c they > don't > want to learn anything else. I think that, in addition to speed, D is a good > language for this kind of stuff because it's general purpose, but has enough > features (operator overloading, templates, garbage collection, etc.) to > reimplement a lot of Matlab, etc. as a plain old library with decent syntax > and > ease of use. This way, when your domain specific language isn't enough for > some > subproblem, you have a _real, full-fledged_ general purpose language standing > behind it. I use NumPy often for it's interactive capabilities. Plotting and exploring data at the Python prompt. That's hard to do with a compiled language. A static language like D cannot satisfy that kind of use-case easily. Maybe Sci-MiniD there? :-) But fixed, compiled stuff, D is certainly the biz. I really wish there were a good plotting package for D. That would eliminate about half of my trips over to Python-land, which are just to get a quick peek at what the data generated in my D program looks like. --bb
