On Friday, 9 September 2016 at 13:32:16 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> Should we be giving up on D and switching to Sparrow?

Most certainly not! I don't think it has to be either D or Sparrow. There is a quote liked from one of Walter's presentation. Someone asked the question:

"What happens when the next great modelling idea comes along?"

Walter:

"D will absorb it"

Link to the youtube vid (https://youtu.be/WKRRgcEk0wg?t=2205)

> Polyglots programmers tend to be better programmers. This is not opinion, there is experimental evidence for this in the psychology of programming literature.

I certainly think that training programmers on lots of different programming languages and paradigms will produce better programmers on average. I guess the analogy is in multi-lingual language training for children. However this does not affect my original point on the overhead caused by constantly switching languages in development and the host of benefits that would come from making Sparrow's programming model work.

On Friday, 9 September 2016 at 13:32:16 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> Why write algorithms in C or C++ when you can do it in Chapel?

For the moment, the objective answers to that question seem: you need GPGPU (especially CUDA, which is vastly more convenient to use from C++ than from anything else), you're attached to a C++ codebase/libraries (calling C code is trivial, C++ far from it generally) or you need the low level flexibility afforded by C/C++. Personally, I probably won't consider Chapel for serious projects until at least the first point is solved.

Of course, there's also a host of subjective reasons -- attachment to more familiar languages, difficulty of selling new languages to coworkers, preference for larger communities, etc. All of those take time to overcome.

On Thu, 2016-09-08 at 15:45 +0000, deXtoRious via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> 
[…]
> It's very early days for Chapel at the moment, but I don't really see it as being remotely comparable to D or even Julia, it's much closer to a DSL than a general purpose language. That's by no means a bad thing, it seems like it could be a very useful tool in a few years, but it's never going to completely substitute for the likes of Python, C++ or D even for purely scientific programming. I'm also a bit concerned about how limited the compile time facilities seem there at the moment, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it develops over the next couple of years.

In some sense Chapel is a 12 year old programming language, but clearly it is still a bit of a youngster in many ways. In that Chapel was developed to deal with programming supercomputers, it is a niche language for heavyweight computation. But that is exactly what Python is missing, and whilst NumPy, Numba, Cython, C, C++, Fortran, and D can help, none of them can make programming parallel systems quite as nice as a language specifically designed for the job.

Chapel programming has a not dissimilar "feel" to D programming in many ways, it's just that Chapel is aimed at big kit, and D isn't. The trick though is that Chapel can be used on little kit as well and in this sense competes directly with D. The Chapel team are well funded, but are still focused on big kit, but are turning their attention to traction and little kit. In this sense Chapel could be a risk to D traction.

Chapel focuses on arrays so it is very much a competitor to NumPy. Except that NumPy has many more years of things built on top of it than Chapel has.

For programming computations for anything other than a small laptop, I'd choose Chapel over Python/NumPy any day. For visualising the results teh Python milieu wins hands down.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Fri, 2016-09-09 at 14:20 +0000, jmh530 via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> […]
> 
> What I mean is that Chapel doesn't have a lot of libraries (also true for D, but things are getting better). If I'm going to do some analysis, it usually takes much less time for me to do it in R/Python/Matlab because they typically already have the libraries that can do everything I need.

This is very true: Python has the masses of things built on Python and NumPy today that make things easy to work with. My feeling is though that NumPy is not going to survive the next revolution in workstation and performance laptop hardware. Unless it absorbs the Chapel (or X10) PGAS model. The fastest way of doing this is to ditch the NumPy implementation and exchange it for either Chapel or something Chapel inspired.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Fri, 2016-09-09 at 12:22 +0000, Kagamin via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Thursday, 8 September 2016 at 10:26:04 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Do they use single assignment a lot?
> > 
> > Python has no notion of single assignment. Exactly the opposite, Python allows everything to be changed at any time.
> 
> Then you probably shouldn't pitch them alien concepts?

Or maybe they need those alien concepts. Consider Python now has type signatures for functions and methods.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder