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SciRuby

sciruby.com

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Re: SciRuby

#11

Post by pwang »

epistasis wrote: post #8

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 g…

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.

Re: SciRuby

#12

Post by rprospero »

epistasis wrote: post #8

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 g…

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?

Re: SciRuby

#13

Post by d0mine »

epistasis wrote: post #8

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 g…

> 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.

Re: SciRuby

#14

Post by wladimir »

tel wrote: post #3

I'm really glad they're implementing Protovis instead of trying to copy Matlab's plotting facilities like Matplotlib. Matlab plotting is pretty terrible.

matplotlib is very flexible and has a wide array of plot types. It's great for quickly making plots of some data in Python. But IMO the output is not really nice to look at, it takes a lot of customization to make the plots publication-quality, and it feels kind if clunky for making interactive plots (however, some animation support was added recently, I haven't looked at that in deail yet).

The screenshots of protovis/d3 look very promising, I'll have a look at it. The last time I needed a JS charting library I went with Highcharts, as it had somewhat better support for the run-of-the-mill chart types I was using in my project.

Re: SciRuby

#15

Post by catch23 »

hopefully they make the DSL similar to matlab. Having worked in matlab & numpy, I can definitely say that having numpy's syntax semi-close to matlab helped a lot when we do ports. It (porting) happens more often than you'd think.

Re: SciRuby

#17

Post by jwallaceparker »

d0mine wrote: post #13
epistasis wrote: post #8

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 g…

> 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.

>> 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.

Re: SciRuby

#18

Post by lrfunk »

jcarden wrote: post #2

Wow. This is very much needed. That being said, to what end are they going for ?

> This is very much needed.

Why? (just curious) SciPy is mature, popular, and has already been heavily peer-reviewed. Then there are R an Matlab and ...

What does SciRuby bring to the table that makes it stand out from the rest?

Re: SciRuby

#19

Post by jergason »

lrfunk wrote: post #18
jcarden wrote: post #2

Wow. This is very much needed. That being said, to what end are they going for ?

> This is very much needed. Why? (just curious) SciPy is mature, popular, and has already been heavily peer-reviewed. Then there are R an Matlab and ... What does SciRuby bring to the table that makes it stand out from the rest?

Some labs do lots of work in Ruby. It would be nice to stick with Ruby for analysis of your data as well. Kindof like the cas for server-side JavaScript: less friction between code in the server and browser.

Re: SciRuby

#20

Post by willpearse »

Great idea and something that will definitely be highly used (I'm downloading it now!), but I really would be cautious attempting to provide what R provides, 'but better'.

R's power comes from the fact that hundreds of scientists have written packages for it when they have a new method - you won't be able to get that overnight. Also, R has strong links with other languages like C.

Finally, while I agree that sometimes R's syntax can be slightly obfusicated, I don't really think the examples on their site are fair... You can 'plot(y~x)' guys :p

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