Hi Daniel,
As a zero-th order approximation that might be right, but it over-emphasises
the difference between observational and theoretical work in astronomy. It is
perhaps better to write it reversely:
IDL tends to be used by a wide range of astronomers - observers use it to
analyse and reduce data, quite a few theorists also use it to analyse the
output of their observations.
Python is widely used particularly in the observer community. Quite a few IDL
adepts have moved to python/numpy over the last 4-5 years.
Perl tends to be used by all groups, theorists often use it to organise and run
models, observers often to organise catalogues etc.
Fortran/C/C++ etc is used for theoretical calculations indeed.
R has popped up as a key language for some of the newer areas of analysis of
massive datasets. Astrostatisticians are likely to use this. It has seen less
use in other areas, partially I suspect because of lack of IO support for
astronomical formats.
Java is widely used in the virtual observatory community.
Matlab is similar to IDL but has a much more patchy distributions since many
astronomy departments don't have Matlab licenses. Likewise for
Mathematica/Maple.
PDL has its roots in the observational community and is probably more used
there than in other areas but the fact is that IDL is used also quite a bit
among theoreticians and in particular the OpenGL link in PDL should make it
very appealing to that segment too (although they won't write their simulation
code in PDL any time soon :). This is basically because data analysis and data
visualisation is something the observational and theoretical communities have
in common.
Cheers,
J.
On 21 Nov 2010, at 10:56, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Just a general question. I have been doing my masters for a few
> months, and it seems to me that we can roughly divide astronomers into
> two groups: Observational guys use IDL or maybe MATLAB to do things
> like data analysis and images, while theoretical / computational guys
> use Fortran or maybe C/C++ to make their computer models.
>
> Does this sound like a reasonable characterization? If so, is it fair
> to say that PDL is mainly geared toward the first group? That seems
> reasonable to me.
>
> Cheers,
> Daniel.
> --
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>
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