From: Ara.T.Howard@...
Date: 2005-05-13T05:15:27+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby vs. java?

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On Wed, 11 May 2005, Ralf [ISO-8859-1] M=FCller wrote:

> Well...
>
> it depends on what you mean by 'the best programming language for this'?
> Should it be fast? or have beautiful code? Should it be extensible? Do yo=
u
> want to rely on existing libraries?
>
> I did some numerical analysis in geophysics and it took 1-7 days to get t=
he
> results. So, you should keep in mind how expensive you number crunching w=
ill
> be. Maybe a week is to long for you.

one thing no one has thrown out here is the idea of clustering your code.  =
we
run a small linux cluster of 30 nodes and this make many codes which we can
develop quickly but do not run quickly feasible to test.  we do a lot of th=
is
since many things just get thrown away - as is typical in research.  in any
case i wrote a tool, rq (ruby queue), which allows one to setup a linux
cluster in about 5 minutes.  for some domains it certainly 'faster' to get
your science done by just buying more computers and writing code in somethi=
ng
that allows the fastest devleopment time which, in our case, is ruby and id=
l.
no one likes to think of things this way but it can be much more economical=
 to
have phd's running slow code on a cluster today vs. fast code in a single n=
ode
next month - especially when preliminary results are required for more gran=
ts
(my work for today for example ;-) ).

2 cts.

kind regards.

-a
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| email :: ara [dot] t [dot] howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
| phone :: 303.497.6469
| renunciation is not getting rid of the things of this world, but acceptin=
g
| that they pass away. --aitken roshi
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