Re: Re: Mathematica and F#
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg91652] Re: Re: Mathematica and F#
- From: "peter lindsay" <pl.0 at me.com>
- Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:31:10 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <200808271042.GAA21194@smc.vnet.net> <g962q2$c66$1@smc.vnet.net>
please see comments inline below 2008/8/30 Jon Harrop <jon at ffconsultancy.com>: > peter lindsay wrote: >> I am not an expert in either Mathematica or functional programming, but... >> is there really any appetite from Mathematica users to tie themselves >> into a Microsoft product? > > I can understand that argument from the open source perspective but > Mathematica users are obviously already tying themselves into proprietary > products... > >> Would Haskell not be a safer bet? > > Haskell has its own trade-offs that I will happily discuss elsewhere. I am not an expert in functional programming... > Suffice to say that modern scientific computing is about writing many small > disposable "script" programs, e.g. for massaging, analysing and visualizing > data. not in my experience - no, not at all. Much of the work my colleagues are involved in uses Fortran, IDL and to a much lesser extent C++ with occasional scripting in perl or python. My Statistics colleagues use SAS and my pure maths colleagues use GAP and Haskell amongst others. However, my point was: does anyone really want to tie them selves in to Microsoft . By the way, we also tend not to massage data. >The risks associated with vendor lock-in are then tiny, of course. with respect - not at all. The risks of lock-in are high and I would recommend anyone considering "buying-in" completely to some proprietary brand [ even including Mathematica ] to be extremely careful if their professional careers are to depend on that vendor. > > So I would not hesitate to recommend both Mathematica and F# to working > scientists. Not least because they compliment each other extremely well. > for the moment, maybe .... > -- > Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy > http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u > >