From: "Joe Wölfel" <joe@...>
Date: 2008-11-26T23:49:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Good math/stats libraries for Ruby?

--Apple-Mail-1-295935711
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset=US-ASCII;
	delsp=yes;
	format=flowed



> My problem with this solution and
> also with SciPy / PDL is their monolithic structure which have
> complicated dependencies and/or maintenance woes.  Coming up with a
> lighter-weight alternative isn't a small task.  So it's not worth
> doing unless it's done right, and doing it right will take a good deal
> of time.

I'm not sure of the best overall scheme for structuring dependencies  
between the libraries.   I think gems could help.   Few of the  
current ruby math libraries are gems.  There should not be any  
external dependencies and the licensing should be simple and flexible.

Also, for these kind of libraries source control ought to be chosen  
to encourage outside contribution.  I don't think I'd personally want  
to belong to every math project in the world, but I might  
occasionally contribute a feature or bug fix.  It's much better if  
changes can be submitted via distributed version control rather than  
manually merged uncontrolled text  via email.


On 25 nov. 08, at 19:39, Cameron McBride wrote:
> I certainly do *not*  think Python is "today's FORTRAN" (sidenote:
> there are a lot of fun comparisons in there beyond the scope of Joe's
> suggestion), Python is better than that.  ;)  I've found my solutions
> in ruby to be quite sufficient, although I'll concede they are not as
> comprehensive with repect to SciPy and/or PDL (perl!).  There appears
> to be more focus on the latter two from the US science community (at
> least in astrophysics, which is what I'm most familiar with).

I agree with that. I don't mean to say that Python is crummy like  
FORTRAN or that either of the two are crummy*.   Python is a very  
good language as well as one of the more interesting ones.  But there  
are lots of reasons to choose between different languages and  
language implementations and with increasing frequency I find Ruby  
and its various implementations to be really good choices for many  
things.   It doesn't seem like basic scientific and math libraries  
should be one of the reasons not to choose Ruby.  Yet sometimes I  
feel pressured to use Python instead because of the libraries rather  
than because it makes the most sense for a particular project.  So it  
feels to me very much like back in the day when there was pressure to  
write in FORTRAN whenever science or math was involved.


*As soon as somebody makes a web framework for FORTRAN I'm sure it  
will make a huge comeback.  Just look at the success that COBOL ON  
COGS has had.

joe
--Apple-Mail-1-295935711--