Re: Welcome to Debian Science!
> The embarrassing thing is that most of my analysis is done in Root and
> Mathematica. I would give a lot for a DFSG-free symbolic computation
> package but AFAIK nothing is close to matching Mathematica right now.
Offtopic:
I still must say that Mathematica is great software. I'm all for
FLOSS, but when you have to pay for something, its nice when the
software is written well and is useful. Mathematica is one of the few
commercial programs I never feel guilty about paying for and using
(especially when its such a deal for students). And if I'm going to
buy software, I always like buying from companies that actually
support linux.
Python:
The other thing I haven't seen anyone mention yet is Python. I'm just
discovering it, but its starting to replace Matlab/IDL for me with
data analysis. I mostly work with arrays of data and images, so
plotting is a big need for me. There look to be a lot of modules and
libraries for plotting and whatnot :
http://wiki.python.org/moin/NumericAndScientific/Plotting
Some of them look very impressive but complex, others are more
practial or simply wrappers to something like gnuplot. I have a lot of
code and group members using both IDL and Matlab so I'm going with
matplotlib for now. Does anyone else here have anything good or bad to
say about python and its use for data analysis or other science
application?
Thanks,
JDR
Reply to: