Re: [ANN] An impudent introduction to Guile

[Lawrence Bottorff]

I've got this 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 <address@hidden> 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
> <address@hidden> 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.