perlmeditation
punkish
I am trying to combat an image problem -- in others' heads and, consequently, also in my own head. Using Perl for science.
<p>
Even with the existence of PDL, and tons of modules on CPAN that do science-y stuff, from a very non-scientific scan of the net, seems like, besides C++ and Java, numpy and scipy get more mindshare. Heck, even PHP and Ruby are getting picked up.
<p>
I was recently talking to someone who works for a company making a triple-store database. The rdfstore comes with bindings for Java, Python, C#, Lisp and even Ruby. When I asked him about Perl, he said,
<code>
db-guy: "Perl... that would be weird."
me: "Why would that be weird?"
db-guy: "Well, Perl is used for text and strings... it is not really used for programming scientific applications"
me: "and, you think Python and Ruby are better at scientific applications?"
db-guy: "uh huh... I haven't really used Perl or Python or Ruby. It seems that Perl is used more for CGI"
</code>
<p>
and so it goes.
<p>
Recently I was following up on MachetEC2...
[http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/machetec2-open-visualization-big-data-toolkit-on-amazon-ec2]
<p>
once again, no mention of Perl.
<p>
As a Perl lover, I feel neglected, but realize that pouting is not useful. Unfortunately, I am not good enough with Perl to make my own bindings and release them. So, I am doing the least I can do -- come to the monks and kvetch.
<p>
Now I feel better, and am going back to learning PDL.
<!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only -->
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-231169">
--
<br><br><i>
when small people start casting long shadows, it is time to go to bed</i>
</div></div>