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

[Randolph M. Fritz]

Oh, my! I wasn't trying to start a "Which language is best"
discussion, truly, I wasn't.

Personally, in participating in a large long-standing research,
engineering, or design community I'm inclined to stick with the common
languages of the community, at least when I can afford them.
(Autodesk, I'm looking at you.) So that was the basis of my question;
what would fit in in this community? The answer, so far, seems to be
that there are multiple communities of Radiance users who use varied
tools. Hunh. Some tools that aren't being spoken for here: I know
there are people using MATLAB with Radiance, for instance, and none of
them have spoken up.

I'm surprised that higher-level tools aren't getting any play in this
discussion; things NumPy, SciPy, and SciRuby. Why, after all, write
your own transpose routine when you can download a tested one, and
also get a tested package that includes more difficult operations like
inversion and calculation of eigenvalues? Perhaps only Greg and Andy
and a few others need the really fancy math here?

Randolph