On Monday, 24 February 2014 at 06:36:33 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Sun, 2014-02-23 at 19:53 +0000, bearophile wrote:
Russel Winder:
> Those in the Python side of the game disliked C and C++ co
> much they created abstractions, ending up with NumPy,
> Cython, ShedSkin,
Unfortunately ShedSkin is now essentially dead. And Julia
could replace Python in some usages, because of its
performance.
ShedSkin certainly isn't keeping up with the programme and
working with
Python 3 so I have never tried it.
Julia is a system I keep up with, it is splendid. And there is
even now
a London Julia user group.
User group activity is likely a measure of involvement: Java
and JVM
technology groups have no problem having meetings with
attenders. Go
went from 20 → 120 attenders per month in a year. Python has
activity.
Julia has a new user group.
I suspect D has no user group activity because it is a 10 year
old
language very few people have heard about. It needs a marketing
reboot
so as to be new and exciting and attract people to attend
meetings.
I've been mainly working with python at work for the last ten
years, in aeroengineering. We've built some very large and
interesting GUI and non-GUI engineering tools. On the back of
that experience I've looked around for languages that address the
problems we found (mainly startup speed and lack of static typing
with tooling around that) and I ended up here with D.
We use numpy, scipy, vtk, Qt and CAD kernel software extensively.
From my personal perspective I've noticed a really heavy focus
here on C++ refugees - that's just an observation, not a
criticism. For instance, there are sometimes questions about what
to use as a Set. The answer revolves around how only an
incompetent doesn't pay attention to exactly what sort of set
they need. However, from a python programmer's perspective we
just want a Set to hold a dozen objects, I don't care if it takes
1 nanosecond or 1.5 nanoseconds to run. Set also reads better
that RedBlackTree etc.
So, I think that D has a lot to offer those wanting to move on
from python. With that in mind I'd like to see the equivalent of
numpy/scipy etc. for D. At the moment that's just wishful
thinking though (IMHO) because it's the people, drive and
experience to actually build those tools that is required, and
that's really hard to come by.
