Hi Chris, On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Chris Marshall <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Leandro- > > I would like to see PDL more widely available > and used. To that end we've been working to > improve the portability of PDL across the major > perl platforms: unix/linux/*bsd, macosx, win32 > and cygwin. The goal would be 1-click install > of PDL on any of those platforms. > Totally agree here, PDL should be as easy to install as possible on any major platform even with all the extra options. I think many Python projects currently make this easier for beginners than Perl but there is no reason with Perl and all of the packaging and installation capabilities that it can't be just as easy if not easier. > If I had to pick one feature that would help > new PDL users, it would be adding matplotlib > support to PDL. It should be possible to tie > it in by calling through python from the perl. > High-quality, full featured plotting library integration is essential to increase PDL's attractiveness. matplotlib uses Anti-Grain http://www.antigrain.com/ as the C++ backend which could be used to create a Perl equivalent plotting library. There are also a lot of other existing plotting libraries that might already have Perl bindings or could fairly easily be integrated. Gnuplot (the plotting engine behind Octave) for example would probably be a good choice. Also I think PDL developers have talked about it before, but a really awesome improvement would be to provide a wxPerl IDE for PDL with integrated and embedded plotting. Something a la the Padre project and there is a lot of knowledge from that camp on how to get everything going, like windows, menus, and interactive shell I think all that has pretty much been already done by the Padre guys and could be copied directly. > Of course improved documentation, tutorial > information, start-up guides... help as well. > > Yes I totally agree, I also think it's vital to increase awareness outside of the astrophysics community and into the scientific and quantitative finance communities (they both use the same tools). So many amazing things are happening within the Perl ecosystem over the past few years (the Moose OO system just to name one of the big ones - yes it's better than Python OO) that will give science/finance users who choose PDL access to CPAN which I believe is such an advantage. > --Chris > > > On 3/6/2011 10:15 AM, Leandro Hermida wrote: > >> Hi PDL group, >> >> I recently wrote a blog post about Perl and PDL in the areas of scientific >> and financial computing and to start discussion about what I've seen in my >> field (scientific computing), that for no reason most people in these >> fields >> don't seem to know (or consider) that the Perl/PDL/CPAN stack is perfectly >> suited for such work and a powerful if not better competitor to >> Python/NumPy/SciPy/matplotlib stack, MATLAB, Octave, or R. >> >> If you are interested in reading and commenting and most of all correcting >> me please see it here: >> >> http://blogs.perl.org/users/lhermida/2011/03/hi-everyone-as-a-bioinformatician.html >> >> I think that awareness of PDL needs to be raised significantly among these >> communities. >> >> best, >> Leandro >> >
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