[chuug] Programming Language and Libraries for Science

[Anoop Ranganath]

As much as it pains me to recommend it, he should definitely check  
out R.  It's an open source version of S+, which is a statistical  
language.  It's got a bazillion pre-existing packages for doing  
anything you may want to do, and it's got excellent graphing packages.

It pains me because coming from more formal programming languages  
(Ruby and Java), it's style of programming is fairly annoying.  While  
things that take lines of code in those languages are one liners in  
R, there are things that are one liners in other languages that are  
difficult to implement in R.  Coming from Fortran, though, I don't  
think it will be that much of an issue.

Anoop

On Jul 9, 2007, at 6:10 PM, Katherine Holcomb wrote:

> As somebody recommended, Python is an option, though if he's doing  
> much
> numerical work he could code that in Fortran 95 and use Pyfortran
> (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyfortran) or maybe something similar
> like f2py to link them up.  Note: gcc 4.1 or higher (4.2 should be out
> soon) is required for adequate gfortran.
>
> However, Python does not do specialized graphics per se.  It's fairly
> easy to make GUIs with it (for the controls) using an add-on like
> Tkinter, but I don't know how easy it would be to draw lenses.  There
> are various Python packages to produce conventional graphics  
> (including
> 3D) but actual lens diagrams is more like the kind of thing a CAD
> program would do.  There are some inexpensive CAD programs for Windows
> (e.g. TurboCad) that are probably fine for "fooling around" but I know
> of nothing for Linux.
>
> On Sun, 2007-07-08 at 20:19 +0200, Christopher Covington wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've got a friend who is a retired optical engineer interested in
>> programming applications with relative ease. He really like spin
>> controls to alter input data for the physics-related graphs and
>> diagrams that he is interested in producing. He has tried various
>> languages through the years and firmly believes that Fortran 95 is  
>> the
>> best language for programming physical stuff, with its easy vector
>> operations and the like. The downside is that he never was able to
>> easily code graphics like he wanted using it.
>>
>> The question is whether y'all can recommend a programming language
>> (+libraries) that is handy for fooling around with physics equations,
>> has widgets and can produce pretty graphs and diagrams of mutilated
>> trigonomic functions or a series of lenses. Inexpensive is a must,
>> free preferred. Plus-points for cross-platform.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Chris
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> -- 
> Katherine Holcomb, Ph.D.                kholcomb at virginia.edu
> Research Computing Support Group - ITC  Office Phone: (434) 982-5948
> I046 BSEL, Clark Hall                    Center Phone: (434) 243-8799
> University of Virginia 22904
>
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