From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2006-02-19T02:50:36+09:00 Subject: Re: neuroimage software - scientific computing and visualization Phil Tomson wrote: > Yes, and part of the philosophical argument as I see it is that tools like > MatLab are becoming 'required' for doing research (many people think so > anyway), kind of like using LaTeX for writing papers. However, LaTeX is free. > It would be great to have a completely free tool for research since > computational methods are becoming central to so much research. > If you want to be part of a research community, you need a good reason *not* to use the language that community uses! In the finance community, APL, Matlab, Mathematica and to some extent R are the tools of choice. In digital signal processing, if you don't know Matlab, you might as well find some other line of work. In statistics, there are more options, but R is a heavyweight, as it is in bioinformatics. But let's talk briefly about money. :) One of the things that still amazes me, even though I've been part of a few open source communities for almost six years now, is the quality of free/open source software, essentially built by people who are doing it for love and not for money. There are *four* open source LISP implementations, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby/Rails/PostgreSQL/MySQL/SQLite, R (and all the R library packages), Maxima, Axiom, Atlas, TeXmacs, LyX, and of course KDE, sitting on my workstation right now. And that workstation is running the free Gentoo Linux OS, the Linux 2.6 kernel and the entire GNU toolchain. And it all works -- most of it beta-level and sometimes even alpha-level! I haven't added up the lines of code -- which I could do easily since Gentoo is built from source :) -- but it must be in the millions! To collect the functional equivalents in commercial software ... well, for openers, the entry-level price for Matlab and Mathematica alone is about $1000 US each, IIRC. Add in SQL Server 2000, Windows XP, Visual Studio, a decent scientific typesetting package, a desktop publishing package, etc., and you'll probably spend $10000 US on software to get what I have One thing Ruby (and Perl and Python) is very good at is providing the "glue logic" to build upon existing software, whether free/open source or commercial. The PragProg folks even have a book on the subject, IIRC called "Enterprise Integration with Ruby". So ... there is a free tool for just about every research need, and there's no reason in the world a Ruby programmer can't have the best of all worlds. -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky http://linuxcapacityplanning.com