[racket] Hello and a few questions

From: Marmaduke Woodman (mmwoodman at gmail.com)
Date: Wed Feb 4 05:28:43 EST 2015

Hello,

First, I want to say hello to the community as this is my first email. I'm
a scientific programmer coming from a Python/MATLAB background, and I
started shopping around for a replacement for various reasons. After some
exploration, I am consistently impressed by the breadth and depth of
Racket's standard library, in addition to the extras like slideshow &
creating distributions (after having packaged a few Python apps, the latter
is especially appreciated).

I made some quick, small numerical benchmarks and saw performance is about
the same as tuned Haskell and OCaml, so I would like to make an effort to
move forward with Racket.

I have a few miscellaneous perhaps naive questions:

1) The plotting library doesn't seem to have the equivalent of
MATLAB/MatPlotLib's imagesc/imshow, which simply plots a rectangular
colormap of the matrix. [1]

Should this be done with the 2htdp/image library? The bitmap function?

2) Arbitrary meshes in 3D: say I have a set of vertices and triangles. How
can I plot the mesh and change edge & face properties? Given that 3D
surface plotting is possible, plotting meshes seems necessarily possible
but is not documented. Do I need to use GL for this?

3) The array & linear algebra libraries were a happy find. Is there any way
I can contribute there? Are there plans to flesh out a larger set of
scientific libraries as in SciPy (optimization, signal processing, for
example)

4) Do any signal processing packages currently exist? I couldn't find
anything on planet. Specifically I'd just like to design and apply a
Butterworth filter to data, so maybe I can write that up myself, but
existing work is welcome.


Any comments or suggestions are appreciated,
Thanks,
Marmaduke



[1] http://matplotlib.org/1.2.1/examples/pylab_examples/image_demo2.html
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