"Joe" == Joe Harrington <jh@oobleck.astro.cornell.edu> writes:
Joe> sign that right away. So, it makes some sense to set up some Joe> trades: I can write a Matlab -> Python converter if you'll do Joe> it for IDL. All that's needed is for each side to provide Joe> examples of code in the proprietary language that they have Joe> written themselves, along with descriptions of what it does Joe> and sample inputs and outputs. That plus commercial books on Joe> the languages should provide all the information we need. Personally, I don't thinks this is a good use of manpower. matlab and IDL are both pretty crappy languages. That's why people don't want to use them. octave already provides a matlab clone (eg can run m-files) but a lot of people don't use it because it never works as well as the original but has all the faults of the original (except cost). Octave is always several versions behind -- an open source project simply can't keep up with the manpower behind matlab or IDL in terms of a feature-by-feature implementation. Users then get frustrated when they try and run their scripts and although a few scripts work, many don't. Look, we don't even have full matlab matfile support, much less the capability to clone matlab or IDL (and good luck with the matlab/IDL API, MEX files etc, on which many matlab extensions depend (eg wavelab). Providing a translator essentially creates false expectations and dissatisfied users. I think development effort should be put into making the python platform as compelling as possible, not in trying to emulate a suboptimal language in python. People can convert -- I used matlab for 8 years and had an enormous code base and just walked away. I never tried to run my mfiles in python, I just implemented the missing functionality in python. Granted, this means some users will never switch from IDL or matlab to python but that's fine, many will, especially if we spend our effort making better tools (eg a wavelet library for scipy) and providing documentation like "python for IDL users" and "python for matlab users". Give them things that they can easily do in python that are painful in matlab/IDL and most of them will bite the bullet. JDH