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

[Nathaniel Jones]

I'm under the impression that people choose programming languages based on
the APIs that make them necessary. Projects that allow us to start from
scratch using any language of our choosing are quite rare once we move past
the level of a school homework assignment.

I use C# for Rhino/Grasshopper, 3ds Max, and Autocad plug-ins, Ruby for
SketchUp, C for Radiance programming, and good old DOS and Bash for
Radiance scripting because those are the languages supported and/or
languages used in others' work that I've adapted. For small projects that I
really can start from scratch, I use Java because it's the first language I
learned.

My two cents on this thread: Pick the language that is appropriate to your
project, not the language that you've heard is "popular".

Nathaniel

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 8:18 AM, Germán Molina Larrain <germolinal at gmail.com
> wrote:

> I started using Ruby because the SketchUp API is in that language, and I
> think it is a great language with thousands of freely available modules,
> tutorials, documentation, etc. It also allows multithreading, which is
> awesome.
>
> Some people say it is slow, but since I usually mix Ruby with Radiance,
> the slowest parts are always due to the ray-tracing process (increasing
> performance on the script will reduce the run time very little).
>
>
> I understand a lot of people uses Python, though... I have not been able
> to get used to that language.
>
> Best,
>
> 2016-04-12 22:35 GMT-03:00 Chris Jones <cj at enersave.ca>:
>
>> I would think that ruby would be a good candidate due to its close tie to
>> OpenStudio and measure writing.
>>
>>
>> At 08:37 PM 12/04/2016, you wrote:
>>
>> 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
>>
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>>
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>
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