Errr about 'one click Mac installs' - did you try SciKarl ? Karl
On 29/10/2009, at 3:42 PM, P Kishor wrote: > > Since you asked -- > > I approached PDL a few months ago with an incredible amount of > enthusiasm. To me, it seemed like it would answer all my questions. It > would replace IDL, it would provide a familiar and completely free > platform to do all my scientific analysis. And, from there, it went > bad. I just never could install the darn thing easily on my Mac. Many > of you very kindly gave me your time and advice. I am very > appreciative of all that, but the reality is, the first step itself > was just way too difficult. I wasted so much of my energy and effort > getting the thing to install on my laptop, I never really got the > courage to pursue PDL for other analysis work. I tried to do some 3D > surface plotting, but gave up quicker than I thought of it. Went to R, > and with a few keystrokes, I had a working model 2 different ways. > Even IDL was a single click install. > > I have kept my subscribed to the list, because I love reading about > the developments, and reading the code that others write, hoping to > learn from it. But, mostly, I am simultaneously appreciative of the > hard work of the developers, and full of trepidation at the torture > that PDL installation continues to seem to be. > > I don't really care about the footprint or the dependencies. Disk > space is cheap, memory is cheap. What is not cheap is my (or anyone > else's) time. I want a robust, preferably single-click (single CPAN > command) install that I know will work reliably on my Mac, and on any > other Mac that I transfer to (one nice thing about Macs and Windows is > that once you get something working on one machine, you are pretty > much guaranteed to have it work on other machines, provided the CPU > and OS version doesn't change). > > Once again, I have a tremendous appreciation for the developers, and a > lot of, but guarded, amazement at what PDL purports to do. For now, I > don't have the first hand experience doing anything with PDL other > than installing it rather painfully. > > Yes, I do hear a lot about Numpy and Scipy (a bunch of hackers here at > Wisc are heavily into Python). Frankly, Python bores me to tears, so I > will probably stick to IDL until PDL comes home. :-) > > Here's hoping. > > >> David >> >> P.S. I saw a paper comparing Numpy, PDL, hand-rolled C code, and >> plain Perl >> and Python code for computing a numerical integral. Plain old >> Python and >> Perl were terribly slow, but Python had two distinct numerical >> libraries, >> Numpy and something else. I was jealous. So I don't think it's >> necessarily >> bad that Perl has a second numerical data processing project >> springing into >> existence. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Perldl mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl >> >> > > > > -- > Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org > Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org > Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org > Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/ > kishor > Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is > science > = > ====================================================================== > Sent from Madison, WI, United States > > _______________________________________________ > Perldl mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
