On Wed, 30/Sep/2009 at 22:27 +0200, Max Rabkin wrote: > I am *not* a physicist, but I imagine many physicists know at least > something of functional analysis, algebra, Lie algebras, etc. > > However, when physicists write programs (this is my inference from the > widespread use of Fortran and the computational assignments given to > undergraduate students) they are almost exclusively numerical: very > often evaluating some integrals or integrating a system of > differential equations. Although Haskell can do these things, it's not > a place where Haskell really shines (compared to symbolic > computation).
Well, if you want to write all the code in Haskell, maybe this is true (some parts an imperative code still is the most efficient, but nothing that you can't do in C and use in Haskell via FFI). But in my case, Haskell really shined using as an interface to GSL/Lapack via the wonderful hmatrix lib. > Since I'm not a physicist, I can't give a good example, but think more > of the things Mathematica is good for, rather than Fortran or Matlab. > My impression is that Haskell's advantage over Mathematica is in its > generality: Mathematica is great if it has a builtin function to do > what you want, but it's not a very pleasant programming language. And speed is other advantage! The code that I wrote to solve a problem in bose condensation is dozen times fastest that the Mathematica equivalent, and much more clean and simple to expand or modify. Edgar > HTH, > Max > > On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 9:39 PM, Khudyakov Alexey > <alexey.sklad...@gmail.com> wrote: > > В сообщении от Среда 30 сентября 2009 23:29:32 Max Rabkin написал: > >> On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 9:24 PM, Alberto G. Corona <agocor...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > >> > Haskell: mathematics beyond numerical calculus > >> > >> I'd imagine most physicists know a fair bit of mathematics beyond > >> numerical calculus; what they might not know much about is > >> *computation* beyond numerical calculus. > >> > > Could you elaborate this. As physicist I don't quite get it. > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe