Perl and Scientific Programming: A panel discussion

Perl and Scientific Programming: A panel discussion

Estimated talk length: 50 minutes

Panel Chair: Joe Kline

Panel members: current pool of which 3-4 empaneled
Joel Berger - Keynote Speaker YAPC::Brazil 2013
appearing virtually
Jay Hannah - Lapsed BioPerl abuser.
Lord of Fire, Emeritus
Walter Mankowski - Postdoctoral researcher, Bioimage Lab, Drexel University
Dana Jacobsen - Senior Software Engineer at Rentrak

A brief introduction of panel members followed by some topics (see following), with some free form questions and answers with the audience.

Panel topics:
Members will discuss their use of Perl in their scientific endeavors. How it was used in the past and how it might be used in the future.

Also, how one might leverage Perl's strengths and mitigate its weakness in scientific programming.

Transcript

1. Perl and Scientific Programming A Panel Discussion https://perl4science.github.io/ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/the-quantified-onion
2. The Panel • Jay Hannah - Lapsed BioPerl abuser. Lord of Fire, Emeritus • Walter Mankowski - Postdoctoral researcher, Bioimage Lab, Drexel University • Dana Jacobsen - Senior Software Engineer at Rentrak
3. • In what way have you used Perl for Scientific programming?
4. • Is Perl just a glue language or can it be a primary language in science?
5. • PDL is the canonical science module, along with BioPerl. Are there any others that you recommend or know of?
6. • I think the killer app for python isn't Numpy/Scipy so much as matplotlib. It steals Matlab's plotting capabilities. Does Perl have something similar? If not, why not?
7. • Speaking of Python, Python(x,y) does a good job of collecting almost everything you might need to do scientific programming on Windows, in a very Matlab way. Is Matlab the application that we (Perl and Python or anything else) need to compare/compete against?
8. • Parallel computing is becoming more and more important. You can get a 192 GPUs with Nvidia's Jetson system (for $200). Have you used any parallel computing with Perl? • What options do you know of and use or recommend?
9. • What about library bindings, like GSL?