> > > > As for the conjecture that Python is wildly popular and > > therefore the perfect choice for computational mathematics > > I can only point to history. Pascal was everywhere, including > > in the universities. Smalltalk took the world by storm. > > PL/I was universal. Ada was the ultimate language. Most > > people probably don't even list these languages on their > > resume anymore. Wait 10 years. Nobody will admit to knowing > > Python. > > Your summarization of history indicates that no language will survive > 10 years, so we should pick a language not on its long-term merits but > based on getting something out of it before it "fades." >
Hasty generalization. Fortran, Lisp and C are still active and they are 50 years old so some languages are still resume material. Pascal, in its day, was HOT. Universities switched to Pascal for teaching, books were using it as pseudocode, and great debates raged about its bike-shed issues (e.g. a lack of strings). It was the easiest language to write. It was easy to compile. It was required as a line-item on your resume. It cured cancer and was the key to worldwide understanding. Famous people in history were renamed after the language! Surely everyone you know codes in Pascal, right? Is Python a Fortran or a Pascal? Well, lets look for some data about how others choose. I have touched nearly every computational math program on the planet over the years. On my Ubuntu linux system almost every python program I didn't write is some sort of a system script so it seems to have moved into Perl's primary domain. From that data point I'd say that Python is a great language to know if you plan to be a sysadmin. (I excluded Sage, of course). Sympy and numpy are exceptions. But even Java people use python for scripting and test (e.g. inside ant). On my Ubuntu linux system almost every computational math program I didn't write is either Fortran, Lisp, C, C++, assembler or some specialized math language like Spad, MMA, Maple, etc. From that data point I'd say that Python is not a computational mathematics language of note. >From the data it seems that Python is "the new Perl", a new, improved system scripting language; a glue language for the new millenium. That might explain why it appears to be so popular and why Perl is sinking in the TIOBE ratings. Would you do computational math in Perl? Tim Daly -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
