Scientific computing with D

[Don]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> 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.

I agree. I imagine that even something faily basic which could just 
write to a png file, or pop up an OpenGL window (ie, not publication 
quality), would cover a big chunk of the use cases.