[Numpy-discussion] Meta: too many numerical libraries doing the same thing?

[Paul F. Dubois]

Chris wrote in part:

-----Original Message-----
From: numpy-discussion-admin at lists.sourceforge.net
[mailto:numpy-discussion-admin at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of
Christos Siopis <siopis at umich.edu>
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2001 11:53 PM
To: numpy-discussion at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Numpy-discussion] Meta: too many numerical libraries doing
the same thing?

<snip>
In essence, what i am 'proposing' is for a big umbrella organization
(NSF, NASA and IEEE come to mind) to sponsor the development of this
uber-library for numerical scientific and engineering applications. This
would be 'sold' as an infrastructure project: creating the essential
functionality that is needed in order to build most kinds of scientific
and engineering applications. It would save lots of duplication effort
and improve productivity and quality at government labs, academia and
the private sector alike. The end product would have some sort of
open-source license (this can be a thorny issue, but i am sure a
mutually satisfactory solution can be found). 

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Those who do not know history, etc. LLNL, LANL, and Sandia had such a
project in the 70s called the SLATEC library for mathematical software.
It was pretty successful for the Fortran era. However, the funding
agencies are unable to maintain interest in infrastructure very long. 

If there came a day when the vast majority of scientific programmers
shared a platform and a language, there is now the communications
infrastructure so that they could do a good open-source library, given
someone to lead it with some vision. Linus Mathguy.