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A comment on SciRuby.

Re:SciRuby by epistasis on Monday October 31, 2011 @11:56PM (#3180555)
I hope they don't set up SciPy as the project to emulate and improve upon. Deep knowledge of R, Fortran, and Matlab would better inform this project of what scientists need.

SciPy is great, but it's clearly best for programmers that have a slight scientific bent and can't stomach learning the existing scientific tools (which are admittedly a bit difficult to combine with modern software engineering). There are some great ideas in SciPy, but a broader set of influences is essential to making a great scientific toolkit.

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Re:SciRuby by pwang on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @12:29AM (#3180635)
Matlab and Fortran are influences for Scipy; in fact, there is Fortran code inside Scipy.

I'd love to hear more details about the deficiencies, or how it might be more influenced by those.

I agree that the ideas of statistical processing in R are absent from Numpy, but Pandas is attempting to remedy that.

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Re:SciRuby by rprospero on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @12:39AM (#3180655)
I'm a physicist by trade and every colleague I've introduced to SciPy vastly prefers it to Fortran, R, and Matlab.

What do you find missing in SciPy?

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Re:SciRuby by jergason on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @12:28AM (#3180632)
Plenty of real science happens in SciPy. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2086009121748039507&... is the list of papers on Google Scholar that cite the SciPy website. Biology, machine learning, physics, and more.
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Re:SciRuby by d0mine on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @01:03AM (#3180707)
> can't stomach learning the existing scientific tools [I assume you mean R, Fortran, Matlab]

The sum of anecdotes is not data, but

It might be the opposite: people who know the pain to work with this tools move to Python for complex projects if they can.

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Re:SciRuby by jwallaceparker on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @02:33AM (#3180910)
>> Sometimes when a solution of sugar and water becomes super-saturated, from it precipitates a pure, delicious, and diabetes-inducing crystal of sweetness, induced by no more than the tap of a finger. So it is, we believe, with the need for numeric and visualization libraries in Ruby.

Great point about sugar water. Totally on point.

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Re:SciRuby by Derbasti on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @01:52PM (#3183239)
Actually, I have experience with both SciPy/Numpy and Matlab and I must say, I vastly prefer Python.

I want to interoperate with C code without disgust. I actually want to write my computation kernel in C, inline with my general high-level code. Numpy does that and I LOVE it for that.

I want to be able to use libraries that are not provided by Mathworks. Serious GUI programming using PyQt, for example. Or, say, a decent XML parser. Or maybe some JASON importing.

I want to be able to run my scientific programs without having to wait for a huge Matlab installation to start up and I want to be able to use my terminal properly.

I want to not have to run X11 on OSX for christ sake. (Though apparently, this has been alleviated to some extent in the latest version. Anyone know first hand?)

Oh, and I don't want to fork over 3k bucks just to write some simple signal processing stuff. (And I don't want to pay upgrade fees every year.)

But then, I don't have an infinite budget, I am mostly interested in signal processing for audio signals and I certainly have more of a programming background than a science background (though my formal education would have me believe otherwise). Also, I am not much interested in Simulink and my latest version of Matlab is of 2007 vintage.

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Re:SciRuby by __alexs on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @05:45AM (#3181326)
What do you mean exactly? Most of the SciPy API maps pretty directly to MATLAB.
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Re:SciRuby by jtprince on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @03:26PM (#3183704)
It's hard to argue with SciPy's success--it is well engineered, relatively easy to use, highly useful, and well documented. Though SciRuby should be able to do most of what SciPy is capable of, we don't plan on SciRuby being a SciPy rewrite. We all pretty much use matlab, R (and scipy), as well as ruby, so these are all influences.
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