From: "Darren L. Weber" <darrenleeweber@...>
Date: 2006-02-02T06:58:47+09:00
Subject: Re: neuroimage software - scientific computing and visualization


Thanks very much for these thoughtful comments.

Matlab is very nice and I enjoy working with it.  The help system is
very informative and all aspects of scientific computing work well.  No
wonder so many university projects work with matlab.  But, I do not
enjoy the inconvenience of running a licence manager and having my work
come to a halt when my license expires every year.  (Yes, some IT
departments do not automatically update the licenses on every system,
including my laptop).  I also fear that sometime I may not have a
matlab license and my work will be locked, despite my best attempts to
create open-source tools.  Most annoying is that I do not know how to
or cannot create multi-threaded functions and I can't call matlab
functions in shell scripts (matlab doesn't have a shebang for
scripting).

I can see some momentum in python for scientific computing and I have
begun to play with python, but I find the installation of modules can
be either easy or painful (especially dependencies).  My intuitions are
telling me that ruby could be a better option than python in the long
term, but I want to clarify my understanding before I get carried away
with enthusiasm.

For a start, I've noticed these useful sites:

http://narray.rubyforge.org/index.html.en

http://rb-gsl.rubyforge.org/

http://sciruby.codeforpeople.com/sr.cgi/FrontPage

I don't see anyone using these for neuroimaging, in particular.

Best, Darren