

Sho: An interactive environment for data analysis and scientific computing - xpaulbettsx
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/sho/default.aspx

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sparky
Can someone familiar with Matplotlib comment on how Sho's Python plotting
utilities[1] compare?

This looks cool; still trying to wrap my head around what's fundamentally new
vs. what is packaging together existing Python libraries and letting it all
talk to .Net code (not that that isn't neat and useful in itself).

[1] [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/redmond/projects/sho/...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/redmond/projects/sho/documentation/sho2.0/TheBookofSho.html#_Toc282280659)

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adolgert
IPython, with Matplotlib and Numpy, has a ton of numerical libraries,
especially LAPACK, which aren't in SHO. Matplotlib is also much more extensive
in its capabilities. Some coder cried when they were told to write another
Matrix class.

SHO has all the advantages of .NET's ecosystem, so that it can call anything
.NET and be called by anything .NET. Making an environment like this should
not be about using a Python REPL. You could work on the hard parts - models
for asynchronous interactive calculations, or provenance tracking, or helping
translate data formats from one API to another - and let the user choose a
REPL.

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EugeneG
Looks like "R.Net" - which is great, since I've never been a fan of the R
language syntax and the available documentation

~~~
hessenwolf
My immediate thought was 'why wouldn't I just use R?' R has the advantage that
almost everything you need to do statistically already has at least one
package built for it.

The examples in the video section; a sticky sorter prototype? What is sho? I
don't get it.

~~~
dasmoth
There's a lot of useful stuff built on R, but I think it's a shame to say
there isn't any scope for innovation in this area.

Incanter (Clojure) is worth a look, too.

~~~
hessenwolf
I tut-tutted and pish-toshed for the first couple of slides but Incanter
actually looks quite interesting. Is Clojure here to stay or a fad?

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dasmoth
Any ideas how practical it might be to get this running under Mono?

