A few notes on choosing between Go and D for a quick project

Sat Mar 14 01:59:38 PDT 2015

On Fri, 2015-03-13 at 07:59 -0700, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
> On 3/13/15 7:34 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
> >
> > It is not Python or R or Julia the language that people choose, it is
> > the superstructure built on top. So for Python, it is Pandas,
> > Matplotlib, SciPy, NumPy. And the ability to use ready made C, C++ and
> > Fortran libraries.
> 
> That's right. Offer solid value, and make learning the language just 
> aftermath. Again, that's why I'm pushing for vibe. -- Andrei

That's OK for its domain of event-driven systems, but there is much,
much more.

If D is to compete in the financial computing arena where Python and R
currently rule, there needs to be all the libraries for doing time
series analysis, and rendering them graphically. There also needs to be
a workflow that fits the users of the domain. The market leader is
currently Jupyter (*) in the finance places I have connection with.

The point here is that these folk (and all the bioinformatics, and
others using computers for modelling systems) need a highly interactive,
stitched together code fragment, based system. 1960s edit-compile-run
workflows do not work for these people. REPLs sort of work, but not
well. Jupyter really gets these people moving. They are writing HTML/PDF
documents with embedded, executable code. It is the 2015s version of
literate programming. Except that they are writing about their domain,
not about the code.

What D should do is ensure that it can be a language usable from
Jupyter?

(*) IPython grew out of Python and become the de facto system, but was a
mess structurally. IPython is splitting into IPython the original thing
and Jupyter all the UI related stuff that grew on IPython but made it
messy. The new structuring makes things better and allows Jupyter to be
clearly not just a Python thing. So you can run R, Julia,… as well as
Python as the code fragments.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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