Visualisation is certainly not behind python's success in
bioinformatics, which predates ipython. If you look through
journals, very few of the figures are done in python (and none at
all in julia). It succeeded because it allows you to hack your
way through massive text files and it's not perl.
One problem with using D instead of C or C++ for projects like
this, is that these projects are a few people developing software
for many users, who are working on frequently very old clusters
where they don't have admin rights. Getting an executable file to
work for them is not trivial. Programs like samtools solve this
by expecting people to compile it themselves, knowing they can
rely on gcc to be installed. But none of these clusters have a D
compiler handy.
On my university, out of the box executables for ldc don't run,
gdc executable files don't link with libc, and dmd sometimes
shouts it can't find dmd.conf. And this is a fairly up to date
and well administered cluster, I know quite a few instituions
still on centOS 5. Now, I can work to fix these problems for
myself, but I can't expect a user spend 3 hours compiling llvm,
then ldc and various libraries to use my software, rather than
just look for the C/C++ equivalent.
Yesterday I was asked if I'd rewrite my code in C++ to solve this
problem, not really an option as I don't know C++. I guess this
is a fairly niche issue, D Learn kindly pointed me in the
direction of VMs which I think will solve most of my problems.
The sambabamba authors seem to be sharing dockers (congrat on the
paper by the way!). But I think it is a factor to be considered
when using D: disseminating software is trickier than with C/C++.
On Tuesday, 31 March 2015 at 03:30:09 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
On Tuesday, 31 March 2015 at 02:31:58 UTC, Craig Dillabaugh
wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 22:55:37 UTC, lobo wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 20:25:33 UTC, CraigDillabaugh
wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 20:09:35 UTC, Laeeth Isharc
wrote:
clip
You're right about the lack of visualization being a shame.
I have been thinking about porting Bokeh bindings to D.
There isn't much too it on the server side - all you need
to do is build up the object model and translate it to JSON
- but I have not time right now to do it all myself.
clip
A comment on the visualization thing. Is this really a big
issue?
[snip]
Yes of course, why do you think Pyhton + sciPy/Numpy has such
a foothold in the scientific community. Visualisation is an
important part of data processing pipeline.
It's also why Matlab is so useful for those lucky enough to
work for a company that can afford it.
bye,
lobo
My point wasn't that visualization isn't important, it is that
in most scientific computing it is very easy (and sensible) to
separate the processing and visualization aspects. So lack of
D visualization tools should not hinder its value as a data
processing tool.
For example, Hadoop is immensely popular for data processing,
but it includes no visualization tools. That is a slightly
different domain I understand, but there are similarities.
So in short, if there were nice D visualization tools that
would certainly be helpful, but I don't think is should be a
show stopper.
Yes, I tried to pick my words carefully. It is not a disaster,
as a someone seemed to imply, but it would be nice to have
visualization, particularly for interactive exploration of
data. One is back to Walter's quote about the two language
combination being an indicator that something is lacking.
