D for project in computational chemistry

[jmh530 via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 4 August 2015 at 13:58:02 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> I can only imagine it being faster to prototype in Matlab if 
> there are additional libraries available. D's just a way better 
> language - Matlab was designed as a replacement for FORTRAN 77 
> - and static typing means the compiler catches a lot of bugs 
> that you don't want to think about while prototyping.

It depends on what you need to do. I typically use 
Matlab/R/Python for statistics, matrix math, and optimization. 
Because all the libraries are either part of the language or 
readily available, I can do what I need to easily...much easier 
than in D.

Wrt static typing, I don't think the issue is about catching bugs 
in Matlab. I just haven't had much an issue with mixing up types 
in Matlab. I can see the arguments about static typing and ahead 
of time compilation for performance, but that's less important 
for prototyping. One good thing about dynamic typing is that it 
allows for easier manipulation of matrices.