From: deltaquattro <deltaquattro@...>
Date: 2007-11-20T22:10:07+09:00
Subject: Choosing a scripting language for scientific programming

Hi,

I'm a Fortran scientific programmer, and recently I have had to write
a lot of shell scripts which let different codes communicate by means
of I/O files. Right now I'm using awk and (to a lesser extent) perl to
do this. However, I'd like to learn a newer scripting language and at
the same time learn OOP, so I'm choosing between Python and Ruby. The
applications I have in mind are:

1) (easy) automatic I/O files manipulation. Calculations, comparisons,
etc. among values contained in tables, and correspondent modfication
of the table entries;
2) (less easy) semi-automatic generation of graph, images, report,
etc., based on data in huge binary files (O(Gb));
3) (hard) create GUIs for scientifc codes, which could enable
unexperienced users to run the codes;

Which are the main differences between Ruby and Python? Which is
easier to learn? I've seen a lot of numerical libraries/extensions for
Python: does Ruby also support scientific programming? Thanks,

Best regards,

deltaquattro