[Purdue-pm] Raku (Perl 6) study group
Mark Senn
mark at ecn.purdue.edu
Sun Aug 2 12:42:27 PDT 2020
| Dear Mark,
|
| Mathematica and MATLAB are apples and oranges.
|
| Mathematica and Maple are much better for symbolic computing than
| MATLAB, but I think MATLAB is much, much better suited than either of
| these for numerical computation, i.e., for numerical work with pde's,
| computing on a mesh, etc. These are totally different types of
| tools. As different as a saw versus a hammer.
|
| It seems like Raku and Perl 5 are shaping up to be pretty different
| tools too, right? Perhaps much more similar to each other than
| Mathematica and MATLAB.
|
| Mark
I no longer use MATLAB. Everything I did in MATLAB I now do in
Mathematica. It seems to work fine for me for everything I've tried.
Mathematica was much harder to learn than MATLAB but the payoff has been
much bigger. I wish Mathematica had LaTeX-based notebooks though. I
really like all the data conveniently available from Mathematica, see
https://datarepository.wolframcloud.com
for more info on that.
Raku and Perl 5 do basically the same tasks in my opinion---Perl 5 has a
lot more authors and modules in CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive
Network) than is currently available for Raku. Raku has everything I
need now plus some stuff I don't use now but doesn't get in the way
because it doesn't conflict with what I do use. One big feature of Raku
that is not built-in to Perl 5 is grammars (see
https://docs.raku.org/language/grammars). I've done a very simple test
using those but expect to use them for real work later. My guess is
that will greatly reduce the amount of work I need to do.
In short I'd characterize the problems that can be solved using MATLAB
as a subset of what can be done in Mathematica. I haven't done
benchmarks to see which is faster. Same for Perl 5 and Raku. Raku has
lots of odd things that were in Perl 5 fixed. Raku has invariant
sigils. For example in Perl 5, @array is an array and $array[1] is the
second element of @array. In Raku, @array is an array and @array[1] is
the second element of @array. A lot of things are easier in Raku,
it has more and more flexible syntax.
-mark
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