Yes my sense is that battle is lost. However there is often an advantage in knowing a different toolset from the masses.
I'd be interested to hear you expand on your comments Doug as to why PDL is technically superior. I guess you are referring to the threading? I don't know much about scipy though I gather it has something like that? Maybe we should have a document on PDL's unique features. Python has a lot of organisational support - in astronomy for example the Hubble Space Telescope folks are supporting it among others. That's a lot of warm bodies writing docs, cookbooks and click-2-install procedures. And there is also enthought doing the same sort of stuff. Here's a joke I like - what's the collective noun for a group of python programmers? Karl On 31/12/2013, at 6:46 AM, Craig DeForest <[email protected]> wrote: > > Yes, these are the perennial issues. A decade ago I marketed PDL pretty hard > in the solar physics community but the installation process at that time was > pretty difficult and that limited adoption. More recently, people are > migrating to Python within that community. Numpy seems to have achieved > critical mass early on, in part because of the faster learning curve for the > underlying language. (That's unfortunate since, as far as I can see, it is > *still* technically inferior to PDL...) > > As near as I can tell the battle for widespread adoption/dominance has been > lost ever since Python became the de facto standard for introductory > programming courses -- there's just too much inertia (and too much anti-Perl > propaganda) steering new graduates in the direction of Numpy and Python. > That's not to say PDL is doomed -- It is technically superior and I continue > to exploit that routinely to get great science done. And we do seem to have > a large and still-growing user base. > > But I believe that PDL will remain a market underdog for the foreseeable > future, at least for interactive scientific computing. > _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
