JT Smith

Joel Berger will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Many scientists use Fortran for their numeric modeling. Some of my fellow Ph.D. candidates have done all of their work in Mathematica. Closer to home, L<PDL> provides Perl with some really nice numerical array handling power. Still, all of these tools left me looking for something higher level.

In this talk I will present some of the modeling paradigms I have been using in my research. These simulations model physical systems as Perl objects (rapid designing of classes via L<MooseX::Declare>). Dynamics are closures which genereated by some objects and influence others. Using this paradigm, simulations are written quickly and are tremendously flexible and extensible.

For the majority of the talk, I will use a Perl-level fixed time-step differential equations solver. At the end, I will introduce (ever so briefly) my L<Math::GSLx::ODEIV2> module, which I use to solve systems of differential equations which are made of closures over these object/closure systems.

I hope this talk will show that high-level languages can be used to model physical systems and make it feel very natural to the Perl programmer.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]