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I think I'm in agreement with you. One usually needs Fortran or C++ or Matlab or Python with Numpy for numerical computing that is doing matrix or sparse matri

I think I'm in agreement with you. One usually needs Fortran or C++ or Matlab or Python with Numpy for numerical computing that is doing matrix or sparse matrix work (a lot of numerical computing is like this). I don't know of any uses that are so small as to not need functions outside of some extremely small/simplified models for explanatory purposes. There is also symbolic mathematics that Mathematica really excels at although it's pretty good at a lot of things these days. If someone just needs fast code to loop through some data, they should be able to use whatever compiled or JIT language they see fit. Heck, it sounds like bash/ask might even fit this use case if the code is so small as to not need functions.

vram22 6y ago
>Heck, it sounds like bash/ask might even fit this use case if the code is so small as to not need functions. Assuming that "ask" was a typo and you meant "awk", awk does support user-defined functions, as does bash. https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/User_002ddefined.html#:~:text=9.2%20User-Defined%20Functions,awk%20what%20they%20should% https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/User_002d... https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/functions.html https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/functions.html The support for that in both is somewhat limited as compared to "full" programming languages, though.
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  Yep, autocorrect I guess. My point being if someone is just doing a little string work than she'll scripting can be very performant and also dead simple. I normally think of scientific programming as something involving lots of large matrices, but that isn't the case for everything.
  - proverbialbunny 6y ago
    >I normally think of scientific programming as something involving lots of large matrices, but that isn't the case for everything. It typically is. If you have the right libraries, it's only a few lines of code to do a lot of math. C = A + B could be matrix math, not just single variables being added.
    - 7thaccount 6y ago
      In my experience yes, but I started thinking about stuff like the human genome project which was mostly done with Perl scripts and BioPerl in the year 2000 iirc. I assume that is mostly just regex work dealing with very large strings. Is it scientific computing? Yes, just not as how I typically view scientific computing.

vram22 6y ago

>Heck, it sounds like bash/ask might even fit this use case if the code is so small as to not need functions. Assuming that "ask" was a typo and you meant "awk", awk does support user-defined functions, as does bash. https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/User_002ddefined.html#:~:text=9.2%20User-Defined%20Functions,awk%20what%20they%20should% https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/User_002d... https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/functions.html https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/functions.html The support for that in both is somewhat limited as compared to "full" programming languages, though.

7thaccount 6y ago
Yep, autocorrect I guess. My point being if someone is just doing a little string work than she'll scripting can be very performant and also dead simple. I normally think of scientific programming as something involving lots of large matrices, but that isn't the case for everything.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  >I normally think of scientific programming as something involving lots of large matrices, but that isn't the case for everything. It typically is. If you have the right libraries, it's only a few lines of code to do a lot of math. C = A + B could be matrix math, not just single variables being added.
  - 7thaccount 6y ago
    In my experience yes, but I started thinking about stuff like the human genome project which was mostly done with Perl scripts and BioPerl in the year 2000 iirc. I assume that is mostly just regex work dealing with very large strings. Is it scientific computing? Yes, just not as how I typically view scientific computing.