[Matrix-SIG] Re: Matrixre: a full-blown interactive data analysis environment

[Perry Greenfield]

I would like to second Paul Dubois' comments about the original message
from Joe Harrington. I think it is probably naive to expect that developers
will confine themselves to producing only tasks in C/C++/Fortran when much
of what they can do can be done in the scripting language. I think the
success of IDL in the astronomy community shows that if scripting language
has the features that IDL has, a lot of applications will be written using
it and use of C/C++/Fortran will be avoided as much as possible. In other
words, I think the idea that splitting development into these two categories
make it easy to switch to another scripting language later is unlikely
to be right.

Indeed in our case, we find Python very attactive for developing software
for those cases where the circle of users is fairly small but the need for
the functionality is great (for example, analysis of calibration data).
In these circumstances, developing such software in C/C++/Fortran is
very costly and not worth the trouble. In fact, much of scientific software
falls into this category. Very often, the ultimate in performance or 
in code quality can be sacrificed. Better code that doesn't run quite so
fast or may evidence some occasional run time errors that need correction
than no program at all.

Perry Greenfield
Space Telescope Science Institute