On 05/13/2014 10:26 AM, Jay Kominek wrote:
On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Konrad Hinsen
I see Racket's strength for scientific computing in a very different
aspect: the possibility to define languages tailor-made for expressing
computational models in some application domain. Scientists generally
don't want to "write programs", and when they do, the results are
often not pretty. I'd like to have scientists do science and
programmers write programs. Racket could become the meeting point for
the two professions.
I've personally watched a number of projects where that could've saved
significant time, money and frustration. I'm not optimistic about it
coming to pass, but it'd sure be nice.
My dissertation is on programming languages for Bayesian analysis, which
can handle arbitrary, possibly recursively defined models and arbitrary
probabilistic conditions.
The Racket implementation, Dr. Bayes, is efficient (in that it's
polynomial-time) and extremely flexible, but not fast enough for
real-world-sized problems. It's also just a core calculus right now, so
it's not easy to use. For my postdoctoral research, which I expect to
start in June, I'll address those issues. I should have a usable package
later this year.
My broader research agenda is to do exactly what Konrad is hoping for.
Neil ⊥
____________________
Racket Users list:
http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
