From: Tony Arcieri <tony.arcieri@...>
Date: 2010-05-08T06:43:19+09:00
Subject: Re: ease of porting (translating) ruby to C (vs. python)?

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On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 10:20 AM, bwv549 <jtprince@gmail.com> wrote:

> In a very small bioinformatics group I know of, they are deciding
> whether to code mostly in python or ruby.  The lead knows that python
> can "easily be ported to C because of its strictness."


There's lots of good reasons to use Python for scientific computing, such as
the excellent SciPy and NumPy libraries.  However, the reason you stated is
not one of them.

There is the Psyco compiler which lets you use a subset of Python syntax to
optimize performance critical portions of your code, however Python itself
certainly cannot "easily be ported to C".  There was the Starkiller Python
compiler which compiled to C++, however it was never released.

The main reason to use Python over Ruby for scientific computing is the
community of scientific computing users of Python is larger and there are
better libraries available.

-- 
Tony Arcieri
Medioh! A Kudelski Brand

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