Karl Glazebrook writes:
: I have a lot of respect for Larry, but as a scientist I distrust all this
: deference to one single authority.
Well, sure, but someone still has to decide who gets the grants. :-)
: I don't know if Larry has any experience in scientific programming of the
: sort PDL tries to address.
All the more reason to write good RFCs. I like to think I'm pretty
sharp, and can at least fake a good understanding of math. On the
subject of experience I can tell you that I've gone so far as to solve
simultaneous equations with matrices. But I will guarantee you that if
you can't make me understand what you want, you won't be able to make
most Perl programmers understand it. If it comes down to that, I can
at least get you some syntactic relief, but I certainly won't go as far
as to inflict higher math on the average programmer. Perl has always
been intended to be a multi-paradigmatic language, which means I don't
mind supporting theoretical abstractions as long as they don't get in
the way of mere mortals.
That being said, I wouldn't mind if Perl became the language of choice
for scientific programming. More generally, for all X, I wouldn't mind
if Perl became the language of choice for X.
Larry
