Welcome all scientists and friends to perl4science.github.com
This week has been an exciting week for the small but dedicated group of scientists in the Perl community. This is because this week we saw the roll-out of two science related Perl sites:
- perl4science.github.com - a site for (mostly) one-way communication about Perl and Science
- The Quantified Onion a Google Group for two-way communication about Perl and Science
As gizmo_mathboy has already announced his group, I though I should make my site official too!
I wish we could say we had a big roll-out plan, but not so. We had discussed these things, decided we liked both ideas, and should keep them both, and somehow, this week, they both went live.
A little bit about the Perl4Science site: Its hosted on GitHub pages, mostly because its free, but it also fosters that GitHub feel of “lets share our code” which is a major part of using open source for science. Futher it uses Jekyll for a rendering engine and a cool project called Octopress to manage the Jekyll stuff. The details are in the site, including details on how you can contribute.
For now it contains some links to a few Perl science-related modules, and some links to the science related talks at YAPC::NA 2012. I want to see both lists grow. If you know of good modules or good talks please fork the site repo or mention in the comments here. I also hope to share some useful code snippets, but I don’t have a place for that just yet.
Finally, and I wish I didn’t have to mention this, but we are working on a set of standards for inclusion in both sites. For now, lets just say, if you are going to contribute, lets keep it professional and Perl/Science related, and the site owners will make final ruling on what is added. Hopefully we don’t have to use that power often.
So that bit of legaleese aside, please come and enjoy both sites. I hope people learn and people teach others. Lets make Perl (good Perl) relevant in the science community again!
As I delve into the deeper Perl magic I like to share what I can.
I have added a pull request for Math::Cephes. This distribution was orphaned after Randy Kobes passed away, but has recently obtained a new maintainer, Shlomi Fish. It is a Perl wrapper for the cephes mathematical library written by Stephen L. Moshier, which contains many numerical functions used in science.
Thanks for the comment Ben. And thanks for sharing that library, I hadn’t heard of it before!
One quick note though, for you and for future readers: as detailed on the Site HowTo, all changes to the site should be made in the
sourcebranch, not the (autogenerated) master branch. Don’t worry about it this time, I can make the changes quickly on my fork.Thanks for the contributions!
Have you seen http://sciencecodemanifesto.org/ - might be of interest?
There’s also Astro::Catalog and a few other astronomy modules by Tim Jenness. Generally everything under Astro:: is science-related. Most of Bio:: too, except Bio::BMP perhaps.