[clean-list] Clean and scientific programming

[Brian Rogoff]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Siegfried Gonzi wrote:
> I do most of my visualizations with tools like Yorick (put MATLAB, or
> IDL, or... here). They are very powerful for scientific graphics. But it
> is hard to do software design with it. In the future I plan to slice my
> work: one part is responsible for the graphics and one part is
> responsible for programming and one part...
> 
> It is a fact that in the community most of the scientists program in
> Fortran 90 or the younger guys in C. As we all know C is not a language
> it is a desease...

That's pretty much how it was for me in grad school in scientific computing. 
I was one of the younger guys using C, then trying C++ (quitting in
frustration because templates didn't work and OO is not so useful for 
scientific computing), then Ada 95 (which I like), etc., and finally
moving to FP well after leaving academia and moving back to electronic
design automation. 

I'm going to sound like a broken record, I know, but Clean won't get to
far in the scientific or engineering communities given it's emphasis on 
Windows and the Mac and the de-emphasis of Unix. My manager is well aware 
of Clean, I'd have no problem doing projects in Clean, but Clean is Unix 
unfriendly, end of story. OCaml wins, and if I want to experiment with a
lazy language it will be Haskell, probably GHC. Unfortunately (for you
especially), there is little emphasis on scientific computing in the
Haskell community.

-- Brian