I spent some interesting time this weekend reading
the perldl and pdl-porters list archives from the
beginning. It was very informative to "watch" the
development of PDL and all the things I took for
granted when I first began using PDL circa 2004...
I particularly enjoyed the evolution of the concept
of slicing and threading. The first mention of the
map() routine and I was "map?" until I realized that
it was the basis for all of slice, dice, range,...
crawling out of the primordial ooze. Kind of like
watching the first 3 Star Wars movies after seeing
the original 3 (in release order).
A couple of thoughts:
(1) It would have been nice to have had some
overlap in development with Tuomas Lukka.
I seem to have inherited TriD from him...
(2) A persistent theme in the user lists was
how to find and use PDL functionality.
It is nice that some of Daniel Carrera's
work last summer and our documentation
review and update seems to address some
of those issues. (e.g., Does PDL have a
matrix inversion routine?)
(3) PP is arguably the secret engine of PDL.
Maybe Craig would be interested in a
colloquium on the subject? I think we're
getting close to the point of working on
some of those PDL 3.0 ideas... :-)
(4) Thanks for the PDL book. From the list
it seems we are lucky to have what we have.
Maybe now is the time to work up a more
comprehensive PDL introduction text.
Cheers,
Chris
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