A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.
30 June 2010
Reardon abused me (not really) for still using Matlab and goaded me to look into the ImageJ world. So I am learning. Seems like I need to get smart on
* “ImageJ”:http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/ and the “Fiji”:http://pacific.mpi-cbg.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page distribution * Python derivatives like “Jython”:http://www.jython.org/ for ImageJ scripting and “NumPy/SciPy”:http://numpy.scipy.org/ for numeric/array processing * There are a ton of other scripting language choices but seems like python covers this well enough. I don’t want the brain damage of “Clojure”:http://clojure.org/.
Other stuff to learn? I’ll have to pick up an editor and source management tool as well. The benefit of all this? Any code I write should be faster, more easily redistributable, and there is a large support community. The disadvantage? I have to assemble all these piece-parts to get something equivalent to MatLab, so more time d&*king around with software which is time taken away from research focus. And the Matlab universe has a pretty good support community too, so not clear I am trading up there. Certainly the ImageJ/Jython/NumPy path is “cooler” along a certain dimension, but do I care?