Slashdot Mirror
SciRuby: Science and Matrix Libraries For Ruby
Aciel writes "Ruby has long been popular in the web/business community, while Python dominates the scientific community. One new project seeks to bring balance to the force: SciRuby. We've already introduced a linear algebra library called NMatrix (currently alpha status). There's at least one fellowship available for students interested in working on the project this summer."
In my experience, scientists will do just about anything to convince themselves that they're not actually programming, if only to avoid pesky annoyances like source code control. The less it looks like a programming language, the better.
Oh god. That would explain why none of their code looks like it's written in a programming language.*
* I work with biologists. By 'they,' I mean biologists. I know you physicists and quantum chemists have it lucky. Stop bragging. You're making me feel bad.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The option of using python is implicitly rejected. Why would the contributors spend time on sciruby when they clearly know scipy exists? Speaking for myself, I've used python and scipy (both numpy and matplotlib) for several projects, but I much prefer coding in ruby to python. All the functionality of scipy isn't going to be duplicated with sciruby, but if the most common use cases are implemented, then I can use ruby for most projects.
why? It's easier to re-implement (i.e., borrow from scipy) than implement in the first place, so it doesn't take all that much time. And, as pointed out, this is currently a minor project compared to scipy, so if it is a waste of time then it's not a lot of it.
Python has a "there is only one true way" mentality, so there isn't a lot of room to try and innovate within scipy. Perhaps sciruby will innovate in significant ways and scipy will draw a little from it one day.
The fellowship and nmatrix commit history would suggest otherwise.