Bill Baxter wrote:
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.
I agree. I imagine that even something faily basic which could just
write to a png file, or pop up an OpenGL window (ie, not publication
quality), would cover a big chunk of the use cases.
