Re: [ANN] An impudent introduction to Guile

[Lawrence Bottorff <borgauf@gmail.com>]

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I've got this <https://github.com/borgauf/pamphlet> fork going where I've
done some editing (grammar, style, spelling, etc.) on the book (up to
"Reporting bugs." Let me know what you think.

In general, I think Scheme desperately needs an "O'Reilly"-style book.

Question: What should we say when someone asks, "Why should I fool with a
new programming language when there's Matlab/Mathematica/etc.?"

I think this is a great project. I myself have recently started something
similar which shamelessly puts coding (in Scheme) together with high school
math. Two things I want to avoid is 1) having other "blub" languages fill
this yawning gap (read Python), and 2) helping cushion the computer science
wall where hot-shot high-school coders go to college, major in comp-sci . .
. and then hit the comp-sci wall, i.e., discrete math, theory, no more cool
coding tricks, etc.

LB

On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 4:54 AM, A0 <cape.wrath@openmailbox.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 06/02/16 00:47, Cao Jin wrote:
> > It's interesting. I have used Matlab for many years, but never
> > tried R. As for as I know, there are tons of state-of-the-art
> > library in R and Matlab.
> >
> > After skimming your paper, I wander that 1) Are these library used
> > in your code example implemented by yourself? Or other libraries
> > are called, such as LAPACK for linear algebra? 2) Is it easy to use
> > scheme and your library, or maybe some others, to do computational
> > job? In practice, those who use R or Matlab want their idea to be
> > proved quickly, not to spend time on coding style, right?
> >
> > If scheme can do most computational job as python numpy does, I
> > will switch to it.
> >
> >
> > On Feb 5, 2016 7:09 AM, Panicz Maciej Godek
> > <godek.maciek@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi, I am pleased to announce that I just finished my booklet
> >> titled
> >>
> >> A Pamphlet against R Computational Intelligence with Guile
> >> Scheme
> >>
> >> The pamphlet introduces (in a truly impertinent manner) a set of
> >> libraries that I have been developing over the last few months,
> >> including topics like:
> >>
> >> - genetic algorithms - fuzzy logic - decision trees -
> >> clusterization
> >>
> >> and more!
> >>
> >> The book (in both pdf and LaTeX) is available with the required
> >> libraries under the Creative Commons license at
> >> http://panicz.github.io/pamphlet/
> >>
> >> Yeey!
> >>
>
> Hi,
>
> Guile has an excellent Foreign Function Interface that one can use to
> call any existing C or
> Fortran (if bind(c) interfaces provided) optimised numerical routines,
> usually directly
> (most of the time, you don't need to write wrappers). I have already
> used it in some projects.
> On the Guile side, there are data structures like bytevectors that can
> represent C-pointers,
> as well as the array data type which has a set of useful routines to
> manipulate array data collectively.
>
> Of course, there aren't loads of numerical packages (so nothing like
> CRAN)
> written for Guile specifically.
>
> The job where Guile excels from my perspective (someone who produces
> optimised numerical codes
> that solve equations) is to bind things together, to provide top-level
> loops, interrupts, easy access
> to the operating system. To impose structure.
>
>
>
>
>

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