Requirements For A Visualization Software System For 2010

[Jon Harrop]

Xah Lee wrote:
> In this essay, i give a list of requirements that i think is necessary
> for a software system for creating scientific visualization for the
> next decade (2007-2017).

You may be interested in the F# programming language from Microsoft
Research. This is a high-performance functional programming language with
integrated Visual Studio support and an interactive mode (like a
Mathematica notebook).

The F# language is not distributed with any graphical tools except a couple
of example programs. However, you can write a purely functional scene graph
library and compiler in only 200 lines of code and then generate 2D and 3D
graphics (spawned as separate visualizations from an interactive sessions)
with the brevity of Mathematica and the robustness of ML.

I have detailed exactly this functionality in the visualization chapter of
my forthcoming book F# for Scientists:

  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_for_scientists/

and I am so happy with the results that we are going to write another book
specifically on the use of graphics from the F# language.

Also, as .NET programs, F# programs can be executed on non-Windows platforms
using tools like Mono. In the case of a DirectX-based visualization, you
would probably need to write another back-end targetting OpenGL.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/index.html?usenet