From: justin caratzas <justin.caratzas@...>
Date: 2009-05-19T04:17:25+09:00
Subject: Re: what could be improved in Ruby for Science?

--001e680f1810cab290046a34a45d
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Juan Zanos <juan_zanos@talkhouse.com>wrote:

>
> On May 13, 2009, at 9:35 AM, Diego Virasoro wrote:
>
> Hello,
>> I've noticed that languages such as Python are becoming more and more
>> fashionable with the Scientific communities, along side more hard core
>> classics like Fortran and Java.
>>
>> Do you think  Ruby is missing some piece of technology to be useful in
>> science? Or poor libraries?
>> In the end what do you think that could be done to make Ruby more used
>> in Science?
>>
>> Diego
>>
>>
> In order to learn anything you have to give up hope of learning everything.
> Most of the scientific community I work with has chosen not to learn much
> about
> software languages and tools citing the hope (or convenient fiction) that
> none
> of that matters.  Some will confide that tools might make a difference but
> it's
> too much of a time synch to really examine the problem.  Scientists are


you mean time sink?  If the scientists were able to perform a time synch,
then they could learn everything about everything.  That'd be awesome.


>
> interested in their fields more than software.
>
> Right now there are few scientific libraries for Ruby and the ones that
> exist
> often lack polish, are difficult to contribute to, and are difficult to
> install
> and setup.  In comparision, a lot of the more Internet oriented Ruby
> libraries


> are well tested, available as easy to install gems, ported to work on lots
> of
> Ruby VMs, and available on modern distributed version control systems
> making
> contributions, maintenance, and sharing much easier.
>
> Possibly there is a window of opportunity during which Ruby solutions will
> be
> adopted if they are sufficiently available.  I don't think it would take
> that much
> time, effort, and money to make Ruby's scientific libraries a lot more
> compelling
> than they are now.
>
>

--001e680f1810cab290046a34a45d--