Dear John:
I'm a scientist (Behavioral Neuroscience) and have used REALbasic for several years.
I am a physicist, and use RB for both my teaching and research into space-based gravitational wave detection.
While REALbasic certainly is not a traditional scientific programming environment, I've found that I can be very productive. I've been able to throw together useful tools in as little as an hour and made applications for a surprising variety of tasks.
I agree. I recently slapped together a RB program to estimate the angle-dependence of atmospheric muon flux in a couple of hours. It was *much* easier than it would have been in FORTRAN.
My questions: How large is the REALbasic scientific community?
I know a few others who use RB, but others I know use FORTRAN, C++, Python, Java, etc. I have only had one (partial) success in converting a fellow physicist to using RB.
What are others' thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of REALbasic as a scientific platform?
For me, the great strengths are rapid development times, easy debugging, cross-platform compiling, nice IDE, and relatively low cost (all compared to Absoft FORTRAN on Macs).
The main disadvantage for me is slower run times for computationally intensive programs. With some hand optimization, I got my main RB research program to run at about 2/3 the speed of the FORTRAN version I was porting. I doubt that any language will easily approach highly- optimized FORTRAN for computation speed, but some optimization of RB compiled code would be nice. Some tools for easily identifying bottlenecks would be nice as well.
What should REALbasic, or its community, do to aid in cooperation among science-oriented programmers?
Interesting question. Perhaps someone could set up a web page for science-oriented programmers with open-source projects (such as graphics, mathematical, and statistical packages) and collected optimization tips? I have some packages and tips that I could pass on if someone wanted to set up the page.
Best wishes, Tom Moore Physics and Astronomy Department Pomona College ------------------------------------------------------------- This message has been scanned by Postini anti-virus software. _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
