07 May 2017

A manifesto for scientific computing

Components of a great scientific computing language

• Expressivity: should be possible to express mathematical & programming concepts concisely & elegantly. This is important to reduce the mental overhead required for writing down and reading models and algorithms in the form of code.
• Speed: should be possible to convert code into software/program that gets the most out of modern computer hardware
  • Functional Programming
    • Paralllel computing
• Extensibility: should have a powerful, unambiguous, easy to use package management system built right into the core of the language
• Visualisation: a large and very important part of scientific programming is generating side-effects: writing reports, generating plots, creating interactive documents
  

Developing a fully fledged, GUI-based software for end-users is not scientific computing. However, interactive visualisation…?