Very interesting discussion so far. A focus on PDL
development for me as release manager has been to
improve the portability and buildability of PDL across
all major perl platforms (windows, macosx, and unix/linux/bsd/*).
We've made steady progress but once PDL is installed
the user might ask "Now what?". It would be nice to
have a clear and simple answer for that. (In addition to
the use case of supporting better scientific development
and collaboration).
The good news is that we have two key pieces already
available that could be a foundation for iPDL:
(1) Interactive PDL shells (perldl, pdl2)
We've already made a start at integrating multiple GUI
toolkit event loops. Stalled for now but I think we know
what is needed.
(2) Prima and Prima::OpenGL
This gives us a baseline, *extremely* portable GUI
toolkit to build on. We could use other toolkits but
it is really difficult to beat the portability of Prima as
a powerful GUI for perl. In a sense it is a little known
super-power perl module. :-)
NOTE: I explicitly call out Prima::OpenGL because
I think for high performance and portable graphics and
realtime visualization, OpenGL is now the default
standard---even including GPU compute shaders in
the latest version.
I'm sure there are some other ideas but, like the PDL3
development discussions, I think the best approach is
to KISS as much as possible. Avoiding outside toolkits
and libraries where possible is a win for portability,
especially for non-unix-ish platforms such as windows.
--Chris
On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 7:10 AM, Paul Goodall
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi David, Craig,
>
> I’d be happy to help with this - I should have spare time in between
> projects to contribute to it.
>
> Personally, I don’t think it would be a bad thing for PDL to be more
> accessible to the general community. Typically when I explain to others
> that I use PDL, I’m met with a blank face, prompting for an explanation. It
> would be nice if PDL were to be recognised as a desirable skill in the same
> way that Python is (particularly, for example, in job interview situations).
> It is a shame that more people don’t know about/have the power of PDL at
> their fingertips :-)
>
> Paul
>
>
> On 13 Jun 2014, at 18:12, David Mertens <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Paul,
>
> To clarify, the notebooks that you mention in your link have two key
> features. First, they provide online sharing, so it is very easy to show
> your colleagues some ideas and calculations. Your colleagues can probably
> even try manipulating the data in their browser, if it's fancy enough.
> Second, they provide means for (1) writing code, (2) writing prose, (3)
> typesetting math, and (4) embedding media such as pictures. They are, in
> essence, Mathematica clones for their respective languages.
>
> PDL does not have an equivalent to this sort of tool. I wrote a rudimentary
> offline GUI data analysis program called App::Prima::REPL, but that was more
> targeted at the Matlab audience, not the Mathematica audience. It was also a
> giant pile of spaghetti, and I got stalled partway through a refactoring
> effort. It is not document focused, but rather tab focused. There is an API
> for building our own custom tabs, but it's really more of a programmer's
> tool, not a scientists log book.
>
> I have lately found myself doing a lot of thinking in LyX, then programming
> in Perl. I would really like if there was some way for me to combine all of
> that into a single document, much like the notebooks that you mention.
> However, my programming time has lately been dedicated to other projects
> (especially, this last week, polishing off some final work on
> PDL::Graphics::Prima for a forthcoming release).
>
> If you are interested in helping, please let me know. I'd love to work with
> somebody on this. :-)
>
> David
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Craig DeForest <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>
>> I wouldn't say there's an online notebook viewer so much a powerful
>> toolkit to build one. David Mertens recently implemented
>> PDL::Graphics::Prima, which is an object framework that can be used to
>> construct interactive notebooks very simply and quickly. For example, you
>> can generate a plot object and connect it to a PDL, and very easily update
>> the plot as the PDL evolves - or autogenerate/autoupdate plots as you carry
>> out a calculation.
>>
>> That is sort of in keeping with the PDL "style" -- our niche seems to be
>> powerful tools that are expert-friendly, rather than polished packages.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jun 13, 2014, at 9:27 AM, Paul Goodall
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > Apologies if this has a very obvious answer, but does PDL have an
>> > equivalent to the online notebook viewers available to the likes of Python,
>> > Ruby and (even) Julia?
>> > http://nbviewer.ipython.org
>> >
>> > I’d really like to make use of this ‘IPDL’ if it exists.
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > Paul
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