Ralf Mler wrote: > On Wed, 11 May 2005 17:57:10 +0900 > "Franz Hartmann" <porschefranz / hotmail.com> wrote: > > >>Hello all, >> >>just call me Franz. I study physic in Berlin, but i am from bavaria (that is >>in the south of germany). sorry for my bad english but foreign languages are >>not my strong point. i like more mathematic. >> >>I want to do a physical model calculation about the dynamics of >>incompressibel liquids. I am not sure which is the best programming language >>for this. I think about visual basic, java and ruby. I know java quite good >>and vb and ruby a bit. actually i wanted to do it in vb but its to powerful >>for me. so i am looking for something easier. >> >>can you tell me the essential differences between java and ruby? what can >>you do in ruby that you cannot do in java? and what about jruby? can i >>combine java and ruby? > > > Well... > > it depends on what you mean by 'the best programming language for this'? > Should it be fast? or have beautiful code? Should it be extensible? Do you want to rely on existing libraries? > > I did some numerical analysis in geophysics and it took 1-7 days to get the results. So, you should keep in mind how expensive you number crunching will be. Maybe a week is to long for you. > > btw: there is a 'Runge-Kutta Ruby Class' avaliable, search freshmeat > > regards > ralf Ruby is working out pretty well for numerical simulations for my work, but that depends heavily on using C code generation to produce fast code to perform rk4 (Runge-Kutta 4th order) evaluations. Speeds ends up a factor of two slower than, say, Matlab, but that's not because of ruby, it's because we're not doing pure ODEs, but hybrid ODEs with state changes, reconfigurable dataflow, and guards that have to be checked at every timestep. If you're willing either to write a core of C code or to write a code generator, then you can probably keep 90% or 95% of the rest of your code (GUI, input/output processing, file handling, etc.) in ruby and be happier overall.