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

[Georg Mischler]

My first "major" language was Autolisp (the veterans here will 
remember).
That got me hooked on the functional approach, which I still value today
in other languages.

Then I found that the API had a very nasty bug (IRRC, "(entget)" without
picking anything crashed Autocad R7 on SunOS), which made me look into 
C.
There I learned that even a seemingly "simple" language can give you
tremendous power.

Next I learned the object oriented approach with Oberon. Directly at
the source and on the original Oberon hardware (never met Wirth himself,
though). Since then, encapsulation and inheritance come naturally to me,
but I also detected that I didn't like the overly verbose Pascal syntax.

While working on a Radiance GUI in Autolisp (yes, that's a thing),
I discovered a then rather new and largely unknown language. It combined
functional and object oriented features (both optional), and had a 
simple
syntax that would not get into the way.
The current incarnation of Python is still my language of choice.
Fortunately, most relevant 3D software (minus Sketchup) has a Python
API nowadays.

Working on code from others, I gradually acquired the basics of C++.
While that one makes memory management simpler than in C (using
predefined classes and templates), I'll probably never manage to dig
into most of the more complicated features in there.

And more recently, I did some deeper excursions into JavaScript.
That's the price to pay when you want to bring interactive 3D
graphics to the web...

Cheers
-schorsch


Am 2016-04-13 02:37, schrieb 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

-- 
Georg Mischler  --  simulations developer  --  schorsch at schorsch com
+schorsch.com+  --  lighting design tools  --  http://www.schorsch.com/