Thanks Bill. I am at the stage of convincing Astronomers to use Pharo to do their soft, but this is not easy
Cheers, Alexandre On 5 Nov 2010, at 02:57, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote: > Alexandre, > > I don't have any direct experience with astronomy, but we no doubt share some > requirements. I started purging Numerical Recipes from my arsenal long ago, > in part over licensing and mostly because so much of the code suffers from > Fortran-confusion-syndrome. What do I mean by that? Referring to their C > book, look at their theoretical development of the Fourier Transform (kinda > nicely done), its very natural use of zero based offsets in the theory; note > the unit offset code. Take in the early section in which they attempt to > "free" the reader "from the zero based thinking that C encourages, but does > not require." Who did they think they were going to fool with that nonsense? > They had Fortran code and did not want to change it - nothing more. > > GSL is not too much better, but they have a working Levenberg-Marquardt fit. > Squeak's lack of callbacks haunts us here. So far, I have gotten it to run > by writing C functions for the model functions of interest to me. GSL seems > to almost randomly require or ignore (often at the wrong times) use of their > vectors and matrices. They have good Fourier and Wavelet transforms. > Squeak/Pharo do not have a Double Array class. I have gotten around that, > but so far at some cost to robustness; I have described many double* > arguments void* to allow FFI to make the calls. > > The biggest problem with GSL is the license. Do you have a strategy for > releasing code that links to it? I am perfectly willing to have others use > my code. I would prefer that they be able to make money if they wish. I > will not be told that I cannot make money from it. A recent thread contains > a suggestion for using a "GPL-compatible" license. Any ideas? > > Didier Bessert has been kind enough to release his code under MIT. To be > blunt, I didn't buy the book originally because I was not enamored with the > idea of doing numerics in Smalltalk (most/some of it belongs in C for speed), > and his selection of topics is not a very good match to my interests. > However, it might be worth considering as a way to avoid GPL code. > > For plotting, I have been using PLplot. You will find many astronomers > hanging around PLplot. > > Bill > > > > ________________________________________ > From: [email protected] > [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alexandre Bergel > [[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2010 3:14 PM > To: Pharo Development > Subject: [Pharo-project] Pharo and Astronomy? > > Hi! > > I am looking for any experience in using Pharo to develop software for > Astronomy. Especially regarding interoperability with Python, using > Mathematical libraries (www.nr.com, www.gnu.org/software/gsl, > matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html) > > Cheers, > Alexandre > -- > _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: > Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu > ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;. > > > > > > > -- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.
