[Radiance-general] Research tools: who what which how?

[Randolph M. Fritz]

We recently had an inconclusive discussion of computer languages over
on radiance-dev. At the end of it, I was left wondering what languages
people are using in their research, engineering, and design practices.

My impression is that Python has become something of a standard in the
research community, with tools like SciPy, NumPy, and SAGE widely
used, though Perl has a library comparable to NumPy in PDL, and there
is a SciRuby also, of course, LISP.

On the statistical side there is R and Excel and LibreOffice Calc.

Then there is MATLAB, Mathematica, MAPLE, and even Maxima is still around.

I suppose we might also have some Visual Basic and C# users around

So who is using what? What do people like?

Randolph