At times it's awkward and ungraceful. But it's also super handy that I don't have to know ahead of time that some code is going to take a few minutes to run so I had better write some code that stores the output somewhere. And it's also almost exactly how I used Maple. And how I understand one uses Mathematica (which I've used all of once, but I think I would love it if I used it more).
But I use no other language this way. And I've had opportunity. There were several years before I ever touched SAS where I had mostly stopped using Maple when I wrote a lot of JavaScript and PHP. And sometimes some Python and maybe some Ruby. And Java keeps popping up. Oh, and R. But this pattern of use has never been a consideration for me for anything other than SAS or Maple.
Is there a way to use any of these languages this way? Is there tool out there that I'm missing?
2 comments:
I use Squeak workspaces this way; the workflow is simple and natural. You can sort of do it with Python and Ruby, but I find a REPL gets in my way a lot more than a workspace does.
Thanks Colin. That's a really good example that I should have remembered. Though I seem to recall that what I always struggled with was putting the objects somewhere where I could find them from the workspace.
And maybe that's something close to a point. Because SAS and Maple are so crude virtually everything I want to look at is a global variable or dataset. Which is also why lines of code grow so massively anytime you try to do any form of automation.
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