On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 06:09:52AM +0000, Jason Bell wrote: > I have been quite interested in reading some of the recent emails to > this list about programming languages…
I agree with the blog post [1] Greg linked [2] and Alexandre's [3] that the libraries and community around a language are very important considerations when picking and using a language. The syntax of Python/R/… shouldn't be too hard to pick up for someone who has existing experience with another language (and you list experience with quite a few), but getting familiar with the libraries useful to your problem domain is going to take more time. If your problem domain is “everything anyone does at CQUni”, that's probably going to be a big chunk ;). If you focus in on the HPC, you can probably narrow that field somewhat (for example, when I looked in 2010, mpi4py [4,5,6] seemed to be the most popular MPI bindings for Python). I'd pick a library like that and start working through their tutorial [6]. > * Is there still a place for researchers to learn programming > languages such as C/C++ - from a program "execution" speed, C is > pretty hard to compete again, especially when looking to HPC types > of programs. Absolutely. For example, khmer is a C++ library [7] with a Python wrapper [8]. > * A colleague has suggested that the "go" programming language > (https://golang.org/) is becoming quite popular these days, is > anyone else seeing this? A number of tools in the Docker ecosystem are written in Go (e.g. [9,10]). I hear good things about it's easy concurrency [11], but also complaints about the difficulty of managing versioned dependencies [12]. Cheers, Trevor [1]: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/c-is-manly-python-is-for-n00bs-how-false-stereotypes-turn-into-technical-truths [2]: http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2016-March/004113.html Subject: [Discuss] Interesting article on how stereotypes become technical "truths" Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2016 07:42:30 -0400 Message-ID: <[email protected]> [3]: http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2016-March/004114.html Subject: Re: [Discuss] Interesting article on how stereotypes become technical "truths" Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2016 21:29:22 +0000 Message-ID: <CAEPjZfSN7rA4APkeNv1Zg6Lv8LyUqn=vcy9tj+hik_bs8d3...@mail.gmail.com> [4]: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mpi4py [5]: http://pythonhosted.org/mpi4py/ [6]: http://mpi4py.readthedocs.org/en/stable/ [7]: https://github.com/dib-lab/khmer/tree/v2.0/lib [8]: https://github.com/dib-lab/khmer/blob/v2.0/khmer/_khmer.cc#L40 [9]: https://github.com/docker/docker/ [10]: https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/ [11]: http://blog.golang.org/concurrency-is-not-parallelism [12]: http://ircbot.wl.linuxfoundation.org/eavesdrop/%23opencontainers/%23opencontainers.2016-03-10.log.html#t2016-03-10T21:53:32 -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
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