Scientific computing with D

[Bill Baxter]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 10:54 PM, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote:
> == Quote from Lars Kyllingstad (public at kyllingen.NOSPAMnet)'s article
> I think you're definitely onto something.  My other problem with Matlab, R, etc.
> besides that they're slow is that they're _too_ domain specific.  They're very
> good at what they're good at, but the minute you try to do any more general
> purpose programming with them the deficiencies become very obvious.

You should check out NumPy/SciPy.  That's exactly their mantra.  All
the flexibility and ease of Matlab/R, etc. BUT backed by a real, solid
general purpose language.

> A lot of
> engineers I know try to use Matlab as a general purpose language b/c they don't
> want to learn anything else.  I think that, in addition to speed, D is a good
> language for this kind of stuff because it's general purpose, but has enough
> features (operator overloading, templates, garbage collection, etc.) to
> reimplement a lot of Matlab, etc. as a plain old library with decent syntax and
> ease of use.  This way, when your domain specific language isn't enough for some
> subproblem, you have a _real, full-fledged_ general purpose language standing
> behind it.

I use NumPy often for it's interactive capabilities.  Plotting and
exploring data at the Python prompt.   That's hard to do with a
compiled language.    A static language like D cannot satisfy that
kind of use-case easily.  Maybe Sci-MiniD there? :-)

But fixed, compiled stuff, D is certainly the biz.  I really wish
there were a good plotting package for D.  That would eliminate about
half of my trips over to Python-land, which are just to get a quick
peek at what the data generated in my D program looks like.

--bb