That section is worth quoting in its entirety: *Languages for technical computing*
I was hanging out with climate scientists while working on Al Gore’s book, and they mostly did their thing in R. This is typical; most statistical research is done in R. The language seems to inspire a level of vitriol that’s impressive even by programmers’ standards. Even R’s advocates always seem sort of apologetic. Using R is a bit akin to smoking. The beginning is difficult, one may get > headaches and even gag the first few times. But in the long run, it becomes > pleasurable and even addictive. Yet, deep down, for those willing to be > honest, there is something not fully healthy in it. Complementary to R is Matlab, the primary language for numerical computing in many scientific and engineering fields. It’s ubiquitous. Matlab has been described as “the PHP of scientific computing”. MATLAB is not good. Do not use it. R and Matlab are both forty years old, weighed down with forty years of cruft and bad design decisions. Scientists and engineers use them because they are the vernacular, and there are no better alternatives. Here’s an opinion you might not hear much — I feel that one effective approach to addressing climate change is contributing to the development of Julia. Julia is a modern technical language, intended to replace Matlab, R, SciPy, and C++ on the scientific workbench. It’s immature right now, but it has beautiful foundations, enthusiastic users, and a lot of potential. I say this despite the fact that my own work has been in much the opposite direction as Julia. Julia inherits the textual interaction of classic Matlab, SciPy and other children of the teletype — source code and command lines. The goal of my own research has been tools where scientists see what they’re doing in realtime, with immediate visual feedback and interactive exploration. I deeply believe that a sea change in invention and discovery is possible, once technologists are working in environments designed around: (lots of inline images) Obviously I think this approach is important, and I urge you to pursue it if it speaks to you. At the same time, I’m also happy to endorse Julia because, well, it’s just about the only example of well-grounded academic research in technical computing. It’s the craziest thing. I’ve been following the programming language community for a decade, I’ve spoken at SPLASH and POPL and Strange Loop, and it’s only slightly an unfair generalization to say that almost every programming language researcher is working on (a) languages and methods for software developers, (b) languages for novices or end-users, (c) implementation of compilers or runtimes, or (d) theoretical considerations, often of type systems. The very concept of a “programming language” originated with languages for scientists — now such languages aren’t even part of the discussion! Yet they remain the tools by which humanity understands the world and builds a better one. If we can provide our climate scientists and energy engineers with a civilized computing environment, I believe it will make a very significant difference. But not one that is easily visible or measured! On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 10:38 AM, Tomas Lycken <tomas.lyc...@gmail.com> wrote: > A friend just sent me a blog post by Bret Victor, whom I find to be one of > the more inspiring individuals in the tech community today. The blog post > is titled > > *What can a technologist do about climate change? (a personal view) > <http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange>* ( > http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange) > > It’s long, but it’s well-informed and well-written. After four chapters > focusing on things that aren’t so specific to the tech-community but > actually applicable to almost anyone (funding, energy production, energy > transport and energy consumption), he starts talking about “Tools for > scientists and engineers”, and (after noting that most tools today aren’t > great), he says > > Here’s an opinion you might not hear much — I feel that one effective > approach to addressing climate change is contributing to the development of > Julia <http://julialang.org/>. > > This makes at least me motivated to push the limits even further here :) > > // T > >
