On 2009-01-30 20:52:05 +0100, Don <[email protected]> said:
Bill Baxter wrote:
On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 10:54 PM, dsimcha <[email protected]> wrote:
== Quote from Lars Kyllingstad ([email protected])'s article
[...]
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? :-)
I am thinking to use Xpose and/or the serialization interface I defined
in the future to get there, but it is more an idea for the moment than
a reality.
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.
yes it would be very nice indeed, and it is exactly in those things
that keeping full cross compatibility becomes difficult, while pure
algorithms can be more easily independent as soon as you begin to need
input/output, logging, parallelizing,... you need to do a choice about
what you use :(
