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Evolution .. Survival of the fittest ...
- From: Manoj Warrier <mow at ipp dot mpg dot de>
- To: James Amundson <amundson at fnal dot gov>
- Cc: "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy dot duke dot edu>, Alberto Simões/EPL <albie at alfarrabio dot di dot uminho dot pt>, GSL LIST <gsl-discuss at sources dot redhat dot com>
- Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 08:05:46 +0200 (CEST)
- Subject: Evolution .. Survival of the fittest ...
Hi ppl ...
First of all a BIG thanks to the GSL team (I use it in my research).
I used to wonder why there exist so many programs that do allmost
similar things? For example (octave, Scilab, RLAB, etc .... (MATLAB
like). Then U have MuPad, Maxima, YACAS, etc doing a fair amount of
symbolic computation (which I naively refer to as mathematica like).
A more comprehensible list is available at scilinux.sf.net/mathpack.html
Possible reasons are:
1) They start off covering an area not addressed by the other package,
(but then spread to cover the areas covered by other software).
2) License dissatisfactions,
3) Coding styles,
4) Programming satisfaction
..... N) etc.
Initially it seems that it is better if all combine and develop
a better product together, but on reflection it seems that an evolutionary
model might be better and we might get a decent software which will
be better than the best ...
I also wonder how the GSL interface to PYTHON, and also the numeric
PYTHON extensions has postured PYTHON as a good alternative to these
various MATLAB like mathematical packages. Of course it is also a far
cry from doing symbolic computations like Mathematica or MuPAD does.
I have been promising myself since a long time to check out Maxima.
Why is all this relevant to this list? Well, it shows how a nice numerical
library (GSL) can be the heart of many mathematical packages.
Manoj Warrier (manoj.warrier@ipp.mpg.de)
Stellaratortheorie, Max-Planck Institut Fur Plasmaphysik
TeilInstitut Greifswald Wendelsteinstrasse 1
D-17491 Greifswald Germany Tel: +49-3834-882434
--------- History of Computing 10-11-3003 ---------------
Then there used to be this great user friendly OS which
overwrote your MBR whenever you installed it.
---------------------------------------------------------
On 18 Oct 2002, James Amundson wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-10-18 at 12:43, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> > I for one would love to see a clone of mathematica good enough to
> > completely replace it, built on top of the GSL. Good luck.
>
> Impolite though it may be to mention another project in response to this
> query, please let me point out that Maxima, <http://maxima.sf.net>, is a
> mature GPL'ed mathematics program. We don't utilize GSL yet, but there
> are plans to do so in the future.
>
> --Jim Amundson