On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:25 PM, Chris Marshall <[email protected]> wrote: > David Mertens wrote: >> >> I don't know if anybody has pointed this out before, but on Monday night >> I stumbled across Numeric::LL_Array. It seems to be a very new project, >> but in principle is very similar to PDL. > > Interesting. > >> I contacted the author and asked him how his package compared with PDL; >> he said he didn't know because he could never get PDL to install. I got >> the impression that he was turned off from PDL by the dependency >> requirement and the footprint, and after the initial installation >> attempt failed he started on his own project. He seems to be very >> enthusiastic about it. > > I'd be interested if he still has problems with PDL. If you explicitly > turn off all the PDL external dependencies then you should get something > that builds quite well I would expect. ..
Ilya Z, author of Numeric::LL_Array, is a long time Perl developer, a rather brilliant one, and currently teaches/researches at the Cal Math dept. I feel a bit vindicated in that I was not the only one experiencing difficulty installing PDL. If Ilya felt it was difficult, well, then, it must have been difficult. Either that, or he had some other itch to scratch which caused him to develop his module instead of sticking it out with PDL. That said, here is an important response to Karl. First, I am very appreciative of his SciKarl work, although, I haven't used it myself. Here is why. Karl said -- > It's a matter of me having time to rebuild everything with the new > releases and put it out. SciKarl is currently at 2.4.3, while PDL is now at 2.4.5. Unless this one click install is done at the "source," it will always be behind the canonical version (by the way, "one click" is metaphorical; yes, it can be a two click or a three click install, a cpan install, or a make/make install, as long as it is an error free install). Actually, personally, I don't want a one-click install. Personally, I want an error free install, because I do want control over what goes where, and a one-click install may not give me that. Of course, this brings us to a very important point Chris made -- > I can't speak to the 2D graphing package other than to acknowledge > that it is *outstandingly* difficult to debug software on a system one > does not have. Oh yes, totally agreed. PDL on a Mac will only be good, when one of the core PDL developers also is a Mac enthusiast/developer. This is where Perl seems to score quite well. Most Perl developers (except for Larry Wall himself) are Mac users. I went to an OSCON conference in 2003, and it was a sea of Macbooks, and I think it probably is even more Macs now. Perl is a horrendously complicated piece of software, you would all agree. On my Mac, when I install Perl and do 'make test' it reports back that it ran more than 180,000 tests, and 100% of tests passed. What an amazing piece of work, no? In any case, I will continue to follow PDL because I find it just so fascinating. And, with deep appreciation for all your work, I believe that we will sooner or later have a full PDL package installable on a Mac (or Win or Linux) without any errors. -- Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is science ======================================================================= Sent from Madison, WI, United States _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
