Anyone around?

@MichaelHale Hello

@Kuba Yup

@Sektor Hello :)

@Kuba Whats up :)

@Kuba are you enrolled in uni ?

@Sektor am I what?

@Kuba Are you a student right now ?

@Sektor Yes, I am :P last semester hopefully

@Kuba Nice, hope so :) Are you aware If I need one of the thousand English proficiency tests to study in Poland ?

@Sektor I don't think so but I'm not sure.

@Kuba No, I am bored in Bulgaria right now :D I am planning to go back to Austria as soon as I can, but still considering other options

@Kuba One of them is Denmark, but a friend of mine is really impressed with his stay and studies in Poland

@Kuba and I started digging around, but what better than a first hand witness like you :D

@Sektor Wow, what is he studying?

because I'm not impressed

@Kuba Architecture

@Kuba :D :D :D Why not ?

@Sektor oh, so I don't know what is going on there :) but I was close, one year at building ingineering

@Kuba :) What is your major actually ? And why are not impressed ?

@halirutan You can join us on the topic of higher education :D

@Sektor I'm finishing astronomy. I'm not impressed because I was able to almost finish it even though I'm always run out of time and I do not like half of subjects :P

@Kuba And what are you planning to do next ?

@Sektor I wanted to do phD but I'm going to find a job first. PhD here is not well paid and I can't focus withoug financial stability

@Sektor MMa related job ofc. And in a year or two compromise it with phD. We will se what future will bring

@Kuba Any particular interests ?

@Kuba For example FOREX ? Or Computation biology :D ?

@Sektor about mma? does not matter I think, I like to use it even in the areas that are new to me, so much fun.

@Sektor but rather something involving cdf creation/ visualisations etc

@Kuba CDF ? Why ? It just interests you or .. ?

@Sektor atm my work is based on working with them, and yes, it is fun.

And about visualisations, mma sucks if it goes about complex 3D visualisations. It is also not efficient with complex GUIs creation. So I was looking for an advice here.

What to learn for this purposes, JS, ruby, flash? I don't know

@halirutan any thoughts?:)

@Kuba One guy at the office always told me that Mathematica is never enough and I should focus on a procedural language, sooner the better

@Kuba I have some C and C++ exp, but I hope I will have some time this summer to sit down read and write FORTRAN code

@Sektor good luck then :) well, I know C++ enough for my needs related to simulations so I'm looking for a language best fitted to the areas mentioned above.

@Kuba Can't really help you there .. :)

@Kuba I have to go now, have a nice day

:)

@Sektor You too, cya.

@Murta @SjoerdC.deVries any exp with JS Ruby etc?

@Szabolcs maybe Steve Christensen is on holiday at the moment. I think he's the only one who can approve the posts.

@Szabolcs Wolfram Symbolic Transfer Protocol. Well, at least it's better than WolframLink. Arguably perhaps even better than MathLink, except for the additional wordiness.

@Kuba Today, my experience is restricted on VBA and Mathematica. I tried to learn some Objective-C, just for fun, but it's not fun to programming in it, It's very verbose, and I really disliked memory management. I'll try to learn Swift, It look like more functional and modern. Chris Lattner (swift creator) came from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, maybe he has some influence of Mathematica :)

@Murta I see, you mean swith the apple language?

@Kuba, yes, the new one. It look like interesting. Here is the free book link

@Murta but it only works under iOS?

@Kuba I read wrong your last comment. Swith -> Swift :p

@Kuba, not swith, just increase my program skills, that are too restricted to Mathematica.

@Murta typo, I mean Swift :)

@Murta Yes, I feel the same.'

Some times I start to see a llitle about Java/R/ObjectiveC... and always finish reading more about Mathematica. The comparison is inevitable, and I always think: but it's much more simple in MMA, and I give up.. :)

What bother me about MMA is distribution and interface. I know I can't have it solved in MMA current model. But in my work we have licenses so, I stay with it.

@Murta What bothers me is the performance of graphics for big 3D data sets, or with opacity. I've seen visualisations in browser that were faster. I want to be able to do this :)

@Kuba do you have some link example? Of faster one?

@Murta workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/…

@Murta jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi

@Kuba, the stelar one is very beautiful. I would like to put all the supermarket products in a cool form like that. :) In what language is that done?

@Murta html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/100000stars

Interesting this THREE.js

@Murta indeed :)

@OleksandrR. I always wondered how he managed to keep moderating never skipping more than a day or two ... it never happened before that the group stopped for such a long time.

@m_goldberg you answered the &@ question very diligently - I´ll be happy to retract my vote - any preference?

@Pickett Hi :)

@Kuba Hey!

Hello!*

@Pickett Any advice about my talk with Murta from above? :)

@Kuba I build interfaces with HTML5+CSS+JS whenever I can. It's easy, fast, lots of open source boilerplates and it's the future because it works everywhere.

But my experience is kind of limited. My background in web development makes me biased.

I'm getting more excited about Swift by the minute. But it only works on OS X and iOS as you mentioned.

@Pickett Well, you know MMA but you are not using cdf. So this is something

Yes, that's quite a problem with Swift :)

@Pickett Thank you for your opinion. I've started with JS today :p

wish me luck.

@Kuba I think Javascript and the Wolfram Cloud could be used together if you need to perform difficult computations. You could easily make those computations in WL and then retrieve it with Javascript from the cloud.

@Kuba I think it will be easy for you. If you are primarily interested in GUIs, perhaps focus more on HTML+CSS+jQuery, but if you also want to do more advanced things in Javascript of course also learn that.

@Pickett Any references how to connect mma and js?

@Kuba REST API + AJAX is the way to go.

REST API is possible with the Wolfram Cloud.

Otherwise, locally on your computer, the way to go is generating Javascript with MMA and injecting it into your HTML template.

Two-way communication without a REST API I'm not sure about, perhaps that would be a good question for main.

@Pickett Thanks for those notes. Well I'm a newbie in this area so now I will just read read read ;)

@Pickett why are you not participating here as often as you were in the past? I like your ideas :)

@Kuba There are very few questions for me to answer TBH. However my summer break just started so I might start answering more.

@Pickett I looking forward to seeing your answers more often then :) Ok, I'm going back to online js tutorials :)

Thanks for help

@Kuba There are too many opinions out there and this really depends on what exactly you try to do. If you are a.. hmm, how this is called.. entrepreneur who is working for clients that need a complete program with responsible GUI and all, then I'm not sure M is the way to go.

There are too many issues about licencing and for the things I do, CDF is too restricted.

@halirutan atm the context is fun. I want to be able to create stuff like in the links posted above. MMA can do this but not fast.

@halirutan contractor?

@Kuba The mma dynamics for GUI are really cool for small things and prototyping, but if it was the final product, I was disappointed too about the performance.

@halirutan That's exactly what I feel. It's great for small things and I will use it when I can.

(I'm sometimes even disappointed by the performance of the FE itself, but the problems there are that it has been grown for a very long time)

@YvesKlett It seems this is one non-fashion way to name it.

@halirutan entrepreneur sure sounds more ... entrepreneurial :D

@YvesKlett I read it lately in some CV that's why I like this word.

@halirutan sounds way more dynamic.

@halirutan so, at the end, any suggestions?

@Kuba Not really. I built a small application with QT and I think today's graphical UI builder are very good and fun to use.

I used the one for QT and I used the one for Java which comes with IDEA. I like it and it is IMO sometimes not as much pain as writing it up in Matheamtica, because the information flow works better.

@Kuba My suggestion is, if your programs don't need much memory and are not time-critical, I would go for Java, because you can write correct code before your first compile.

@halirutan uff, I was afraid you won't add a summary :0

@halirutan isn't qt on commercial license?

I'm not good at writing code where I have to take care of the language design issues and the algorithm I want to implement. So if the IDE takes care that I write correct code I'm really happy.

@Kuba This is possible. I used it in an educational setting, so it didn't apply for me.

@halirutan What library would you use to create a star visualization like the one Kuba linked to in Java? I tried to do some visualizations, basic stuff, like this in Java but it was very slow :(

@Kuba But QT is really really grown, it looks on every system like the native UI and there is a lot of documentation about it.

@Pickett And you used JOGL?

@halirutan I used Java3D which is built on top of JOGL I think. But perhaps Java3D is what's slowing it down?

I mean there are lots of things I could have done wrong so I'm not trying to troubleshoot. I'm just interested. So you would use JOGL?

@Pickett I don't know. I would hope that Java3D doesn't add so much that it slows such a simple thing as your example down.

@Pickett the only thing I know is that I though Java3D is more for 3D plotting of graphs. JOGL is just OpenGL wrappend for Java. So they basically call the native C-functions.

@halirutan ok, thanks for your input. If I go back to that project I will probably try a bit more with Java3D and then try JOGL directly.

@halirutan Thanks your opinion :)

@Pickett @Kuba No problem. There are definitely more people out there who work with other technologies everyday who can give tips.

@halirutan There is a question about mma alternatives but the answers are focussing on other aspects. I think we could create a broader topic with alternatives for different capabilities of mma.

@halirutan @Pickett @YvesKlett ok, have to go. Have a goodnight.

@LeonidShifrin Rebol is extremely interesting while almost completely unknown. Thank you for the tip!

@Kuba I'm afraid not. Only older languages such as Pascal, Forth, Basic, C, C++. I' m learning a bit of Python at the moment.

@barznjy C, D, E, I, O, N

Just start everything with a lowercase character and you are always OK

@SjoerdC.deVries Thank you.

@SjoerdC.deVries @barznjy And K. Actually K is not Protected, but assigning to it will break things.

@barznjy As Sjoerd said, the sure way to avoid trouble is never to use symbols starting with uppercase letter. I do this, except when writing a package. If I put in the effort to write a package, then it's not too much extra work to check all symbols.

@LeonidShifrin J is an interesting one (APL variant).

@Szabolcs Thanks, I will keep this in mind "always lowercase is safe"

@halirutan speak for yourself!

could never stomach Java ...

There's a library for everything, which is very useful, but it's so bloody wordy ...

@Szabolcs There is a major reason for Java: Every little thing you do needs at least 34 classes and 10k lines of code. This always looks impressive..

@Szabolcs Does it have a wider choice of libraries than Python? I once tried to write some simple things in Java just to see how it works and really didn't like its wordiness.

@acl Actually I don't have much experience with it. Like you, tried it once, but didn't like it, and didn't really need it, so I stopped there.

I guess it's better if you get used to some IDE that helps with it, but I don't see any advantages over the C/Python/Mathematica combination I normally use

Python is high level and slow though. Java is lower level and it's supposed to be pretty fast.

@Szabolcs @halirutan probably knows

@acl I use the same.

@Szabolcs yes sure, so I use C if I need anything faster (which is unusual, most of what I do is manipulating large matrices anyway so Python and Mathematica aren't any slower than anything else)

I want to look at REBOL (what Leonid mentioned), just out of curiosity. It's almost certain that it's not going to be useful, but I want to see what it's about.

@Szabolcs Yes I don't think that's unusual. Python is really nice to use, reasonably easy to pick up and has libraries, C is fast and simple if Python is too slow.

I learned a bit of J the other day. That was an interesting exercise.