Hello Mark,
If you can't find an open source math package that meets your needs you
may want to take a look at CenterSpace's NMath Library. The library is
.Net compatible. See:
http://www.centerspace.net/products/nmath/
Cost: $995 for Nmath or $1295 for NMath and a statistical library.
Howard
On 12/20/2010 12:32 PM, Mark Senko wrote:
Thank you.
My real goal is to find a decent math/numerical package that I can use
without having to reinvent the wheel.
My searches came up with numpy/SciPy. Whether it actually uses the C
interface or is a refactored version for .NET really doesn’t matter
to me.
At least not much.
I think I’ll take this opportunity to explain to this portion of the
IronPython community (which seems to contain most of the real “movers”
) why I chose IronPython, and what I want to accomplish with it.
I’m sure my use case may be of interest, at least academically, to
some of you.
I write software that controls hardware … it moves samples around with
a robot and stage, controls shutters, light sources, moves optics,
performs data acquisition and data analysis.
It’s a complicated system. It requires scientists and engineers with
high levels of knowledge in optics, physics, electronics to develop,
study and understand performance, and to calibrate.
At my old company, we wrote our own macro language (early ‘90s) which
provided functions to move the pieces of hardware, call higher level
routines in our code, call mathematical and higher level analysis
routines, plot, macros could call other macros … just about anything
you want a scripting language to do. The portion of my efforts I
spent extending this macro language was time well spent. Instead of
being the bottleneck that had to write all new tests and experiments
and new platform prototyping, I enabled the other scientists and
engineers to do it themselves. I was an enabler, and productivity shot
through the roof.
Some of the macros written were simple, others complicated … but most
were not written by me, they were written by the scientists and engineers.
But, they were not programmers … at least not in the computer
scientist sense. They think procedurally, not object oriented. They
don’t want to argue about global vs. local variables, or whether a
GOTO is good programming style. They don’t develop web pages.
At my new company, which builds a tool with similar demands, I am
implementing similar scripting abilities. I didn’t want to write my
own scripting language again, that would be crazy with the number that
are already available.
The core needs are control over the hardware, numerical capabilities,
plotting capabilities. The language also needs to be straightforward
without too much overhead, like a pile of import statements, that
don’t really contribute to the functionality. I also wanted a
language with a some history, and lot’s of community written libraries
that I could use without having to write my own.
I did my internet search and looked at many different scripting
languages, finally settling on Python as having the best set of
language features for my needs.
Granted, I HATE the indentation control, especially since an
auto-indented line has a “different” indentation than the preceding
line which was indented with spaces (unless you carefully set up your
editor).
I would much rather see braces or ENDIF,ENDFOR, ENDDEF … statements.
That’s just an aside …
Our company uses C#. I quickly discovered that C# and Python don’t
play well together …. Ah, but here is IronPython.
So I learned how to embed it, wrote my own console, learned how to
make static wrappers, how to make my functions global, and how to make
python functions global. I’m still learning the best and easiest ways
to use it for our needs.
But, I’m starting to find that the community developed libraries I was
counting on are more often than not out of reach. That is what I found
when I started looking for a simple math package that would fit a
polynomial, perform an FFT, maybe even do a non-linear least squares
fit. And I still need to find a plotting package …
Anyway, I thought this might be interesting to some of you.
*Mark Senko*
Complete Genomics, Inc.
2071 Stierlin Court
Mountain View, CA 94043
*From:*users-boun...@lists.ironpython.com
[mailto:users-boun...@lists.ironpython.com] *On Behalf Of *Jason
McCampbell
*Sent:* Monday, December 20, 2010 7:13 AM
*To:* Discussion of IronPython
*Subject:* Re: [IronPython] SciPy
Hi Mark,
As Dino mentioned we (Enthought) are working on refactoring Numpy into
a pure C core with CPython and IronPython interface layers. This is
largely complete and available at github
(https://github.com/numpy/numpy-refactor), though the core layer is
largely undocumented thus far. This is the multi-dimensional array.
SciPy is in progress and we are updating it to work with the
refactored numpy core and to add an IronPython
