Grant Application 2012: Scientific Computing in Ruby

Applicant: The Ruby Science Foundation

Contact: John Woods (Director)

Email: [email protected]

Biography:

TODO

Project title: Developing Ruby into a Scientific Computing Language

Project details:

Scientific Computing is an area currently dominated by proprietary scripting languages such as MATLAB. There are also a number of domain-specific scripting languages that dominate individual fields (such as IDL in astronomy). Universally, these are expensive solutions, and they tend to be poorly suited for general programming work. There is a trend in the scientific computing community to move toward open source solutions based on a general purpose existing language. The focus is primarily on Python and SciPy thanks to SciPy's relative maturity. Yet, the market remains dominated by proprietary solutions.

The Ruby Science Foundation has recently started the SciRuby project. It aims to turn Ruby into a strong language for numerical work. This work is long overdue for Ruby, but the Foundation has been making great strides in recent months. We have developed a core array language with the NMatrix module, and we have begun to develop an entire family of modules covering visualization, statistics, integration and minimization. These efforts have led to renewed momentum in the community.

Project deliverables:

Proposed grant amount: $3,000 - $5,000 USD