Pandas like features

bachmeier no at spam.net
Sun Oct 25 23:30:10 UTC 2020


On Sunday, 25 October 2020 at 20:30:58 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Friday, 23 October 2020 at 19:31:08 UTC, bioinfornatics 
> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>> 2/ does the scientific computing field is something that D 
>> language want to grow ?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Best regards
>
> I'm certainly interested in it, but doing it well takes time.

Over time, I've come to three conclusions on this topic. I don't 
know that time is the issue.

1. This community seems to have NIH syndrome. A lot of users are 
averse to reuising the functionality provided by other languages. 
I find that downright weird given that one of the selling points 
of D is its ability to easily interoperate with other languages. 
It makes sense to *extend* existing projects in other languages 
using D. The idea of rewriting millions of lines of code for no 
benefit other than just saying it's written in D is obviously 
pointless, so there's no motivation to do it.

2. Scientific computing is a big field. In terms of things you'd 
need to be "complete", you'd have to write maybe ten times as 
much code as you would to have a complete web development 
offering. It also requires incredible amounts of expertise. 
Statistics, economics, physics, math, chemistry, biology, and on 
and on are all areas that individually require a great deal of 
specialized knowledge in addition to time. For some things, 
performance is the most important property, including use of the 
GPU. That's not simple.

3. D's syntax is okay, but it's not flexible enough to express 
eveything you need to work comfortably. A DSL or similar might be 
necessary.


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