I am trying to combat an image problem -- in others' heads and, consequently, also in my own head. Using Perl for science.

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.

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,

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 u
+sed for programming scientific applications"

me: "and, you think Python and Ruby are better at scientific applicati
+ons?"

db-guy: "uh huh... I haven't really used Perl or Python or Ruby. It se
+ems that Perl is used more for CGI"
[download]

and so it goes.

Recently I was following up on MachetEC2... http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/machetec2-open-visualization-big-data-toolkit-on-amazon-ec2

once again, no mention of Perl.

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.

Now I feel better, and am going back to learning PDL.