[PLUG] Are dependences obsolete?

[Rich Shepard]

On Fri, 21 Mar 2014, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> However, I do a lot of science/technical/medical work.  These oddball
> programs do a particular task and there are not many alternatives.  The
> author is usually a subject specialist rather than a programmer, with bits
> of contributed code, borrowed code, and cargo cult code, jury rigged for
> the programmer's particular distro, and dependent on its idiosyncracies. 
> The other 99.9% of sourceforge. I run more than 100 such programs on my
> machines, and another 50 or so that I wrote myself - 100 to 500 liners,
> not big stuff, usually for data reduction, algorithmic design generation,
> or numerical simulation.

> For the big, slow stuff, I'll have to keep tweaking C code, sigh.

Keith,

   If you are so inclined, take a look at Python, especially the
scientific/numeric tools such as NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, SciPy, and so
on. I'm not aware of another language (other than FORTRAN) that has so much
support for scientific computing. Not only that, but you can wrap C, C++.
and FORTRAN code with SWIG and call the compiled code from within a Python
method.

   I've no idea of Python CAD or circuit design tools since I don't use them,
but the range of applications (such as astronomy and other large data,
compute intensive tasks) is impressive.

   That's my $0.25 worth (inflation, you know).

Rich