Re: [seul-sci] Introduction

[xcalbet@inm.es]

On 31 Mar, Danilo Gonzalez Hashimoto wrote:

> 	That's my feeling: Pete's proposed GAM is essencial to Linux in Science. 
> If you have a good infra-structure(common scripting language(s), modularity, 
> standardized file formats, etc), and good basic software(data archiving and cataloging, 
> R-like analisis...) with a nice user interface, 
> 'more specialized people' will write 'more specialized software' to fulfill their needs, 
> with many advantages, in this platform.
> 

Thanks for the answer, now your reasons make much more sense!!
Yes, I guess you have enough reasons to switch to Linux!!

	
> 	What do you think should be basic software to scientific purposes? 
> Do you think a inteface to other programs is enough, or perhaps rewriting/merging/borrowing 
> is better? 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> DANILO GONZALEZ HASHIMOTO
>  
> Universidade Federal de São Carlos
> Bacharelado em Ciência da Computação
> 


As Pete says these are really complicated questions.
Right now I am using Perl and PDL for everything :=)
It fits very well to what I am doing, you can write scripts
really fast and it also runs very fast. 
Plotting is really straitforward.
The main drawback is that it is not an easy language to learn (it is a
bit more complicated than matlab).
It does have an interface to the R language, but I beleive
it is not complete, it only has some distributions and that is it.
It does not have a powerful statistical package like R either,
so maybe for biologists or such it is not the greatest.
(I still have to check this point, so dont take my word for it).

Unfortunately there is no GUI, so maybe writing one for it
would be nice :=) I have been thinking on it for some
time and I think a graphical language could be built
for it (similar to Khoros or Labview) with not too much
effort based on the Dia (GNOME) drawing program.
This program could also be used for data adquisition.

Anyway, those are my ideas :=)


Xavier Calbet