Take a beginner programmer...I guarantee they will get up to speed in Python quicker than Perl. For example, python doesn't require you to remember that the list uses @, but when you want just one element of it you have to use scalar context "$" and other weirdness. With that being said, I think Perl allows the power user a lot of flexibility in building applications and is probably more productive for that kind of expert in small to medium size apps. This isn't to say Python doesn't have power users either. Perl the language gets dramatically powered up by CPAN modules like MOOSE that give it more advanced OO than many OO languages like Python.
There's actually a ton of business software written in Smalltalk. I think 2/3 of the world's shipping industry is controlled via Smalltalk for example. It isn't super low level like C, so I wouldn't use it for something that needs to be blazing fast. I believe Smalltalk pioneered the JIT technology that Java uses (hotspot...if I recall correctly). It isn't a silver bullet, but seems like a neat language.
Sorry, I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm aware what a DSL is (like View dialect), but no clue how to start creating one other than it has something to do with blocks and Red's homoiconicity. There needs to be a specific spot on the documentation page that gives a good overview with simple examples and finally a more complicated one. In fact, I hope they do that with all the planned additions of erlang like concurrency...etc. You know what I mean?
Perfect example is my mother in law bought one for her husband. They then have to have us set it up and after asking it a knock knock joke or two end up hating it. I've observed that a lot of the over 50 crowd get the weather + news from the TV, while the technologically savy use the internet or a phone app already. Sure Alexa can do it, but it honestly isn't much more convenient than your phone which is easier to glance at visual data than listen for a couple of minutes as Alexa reads it off. There is a cool list of Easter eggs someone posted on Reddit like asking her to "beam me up", "set phasers to stun", or "Alexa I am your father". It has a neat SciFi choose your own adventure game, but they thought that was stupid. One thing that bothered me was Alexa couldn't say who made her other than "Amazon". The AIM chatbot smarterchild could even spit out a list. I wanted to hear a list of developers or something funny like the "marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation" (from hitchikers guide to the galaxy).
Pumped storage is actually quite common where you have a lot of dams. The Bonneville Power Administration in the upper Westside of the US can essentially press a button and have quite a bit of power due to all the dams.
How many 100 MW batteries exist and how economical are they? 100 MW is much better than 10 MW, but still small if you look at the current load in MISO, SPP, PJM, ISO-NE, NYISO, CAISO...etc. So we have a long time before we can get rid of all fossil based sources...and even then how long can that battery provide 100 MW?
Nope, the main issue is indeed the fact that it can't store a whole lot of energy (also important that they can't maintain a high output for too long), but we still talk in MW as that is what we're primarily concerned with (MW flow on a line going over the line's rating...not having enough generation (MW) to meet load (MW)...etc). Saying a battery can't store enough MW isn't scientifically accurate, but it is the slang of the industry if you will. If you worked in the water industry they're probably very concerned with water flow rates. In high voltage transmission we're concerned with the flow of power (MW (real power) & MVAR (reactive power))
You're correct, but in the industry we really just talk in terms of Power at the transmission grid level and usually in millions of watts or MW. So if a coal plant is currently generating 2000 MW and you have a battery that can only consume 5 MW or 0.25%, then that isn't very much storage. Put another way, let's say the load in your region is 60 GW and you have 200 MW of energy storage. That is only a tiny fraction of storage relative to what the demand is.
Batteries simply don't really exist to store grid level amounts of energy. You have to stack lots and lots of batteries which costs lots and lots of money and still only stores something like ~10 MW when we have 1500 MW coal plants. Electricity is used immediately, so we really can't economically store it in the levels we need. In the future (this is just starting to occur), large batteries will charge (as a load) when the price is low and discharge (as a generator)when it is high which allows the owner to make money and helps the grid as these resources can provide power nearly instantaneously. Right now they're small and few in number, but they will get bigger and more prevalent assuming battery technology continues to get better.
Negative prices occur all the time in the US. Not every day, but often enough when load is low and the wind is blowing. As more and more renewable are built, this will occur in increasing amounts. We still have to have non-green generation online as wind and solar can massively fluctuate. For the time being, the state commissions help out the utilities via legislation and increasing rates. This isn't some conspiracy, but what you do if you want available power 24x7.
I was just testing out the language a year or so ago, so it wasn't super high priority to get it to work. I didn't try very hard. I think you need to configure your email + password in the Rebol tool itself and it should work. Unfortunately a lot of the pre-packaged demo scripts call out to parts of the rebol site which no longer exist, so a little bit of bitrot.
Hard to describe the beginner experience with FPC (nice acronym) + Lazarus and Rebol. Rebol has a lot of sites showing you how to build simple GUIs fast although some things are getting old (had trouble getting the native email functionality to work). So more beginner friendly doc would help both projects a lot. Also, I think it would help pointing out that certain things like connecting to an Oracle db are easy in C#/Java, but aren't obvious to me with FPC.
I hope Red puts up a couple of really simple examples on how to build DSLs. It's one of the great things Red/Rebol has to offer, but it isn't obvious how to do it.
I've written a few minor Tk based apps in Python and if you look at Rebol (Red's ancestor) it is much much much easier to build a similar GUI. This Rebol guy has several sites where he builds dozens of small applications that are almost freaking one liners:
I'm not sure how easy it is to do DSLs. You don't see this popup in the Red or Rebol docs for a reason. It is homoiconic like Lisp, so it should be feasible. I'd love to hear some of the core devs like doc respond.
Always glad to see Red get some more attention. I think these little lightweight apps are the way to go for sure. I like freePascal + Lazarus too, but I wish they made certain things easier. Red's syntax isn't a silver bullet, but I like how they have DSLs for so many things and native data types for things like email and web scraping that would require libraries in other languages.
When a contingency happens (loss of equipment such as a generator), units respond pretty much immediately due to governor response in the unit itself (good ole' inertia). Most RTO/ISOs in the USA (I know AEMO is in Australia) have a very large amount of power already ready to go if a unit trips offline. Using batteries to help with this is being worked on. They already exist, but new market rules are being drafted in order to allow them to be taken advantage of and properly compensated. The term is stored energy resource. Google that term in conjunction with ISO-NE, PJM, MISO, SPP, NYISO, CAISO...etc.
How many species are at the hockey stick point is unknown...depends on what numbers you plug into the Drake equation variables. Could be rare or lots of us.
Bioperl is specific to biology/genomics to my knowledge although you could probably use it for other tasks. I'd use PDL if it had more use and support and was easier to setup, but it's a pain in that regard. I've tried installing it on windows via strawberry perl & activestate and won't be trying again after the 1/2 hour install repeatedly failed tests.
This gets asked a fair amount on r/perl and on here. In short, because it's still a great language with yearly releases and a large library ecosystem (CPAN). It's built in to Linux and works really well there (although Python is as well), but also you can generally run 20 year old perl code in a 5.26 distribution of Perl without much issue. Performance is really good too. I'd say it's harder to learn than Python if you had to pick one, but if you're already good with Perl, there's really not a reason to go to Python unless you need to do numerical work (numpy/scypy) or data work (Pandas & Matplotlib). Perl has 3 good web frameworks. The language's base OO support is pretty sparse, but the Moose module on CPAN allows Perl to become supercharged with very advanced OO capabilities and the Moo module is a lightweight version of Moose that is a lower performance hit. Perl is much better than Python or Ruby for shell one-liners to do quick and dirty work as it has a lot of things built in to help there (see book Perl Oneliners). They spent 15 years designing Perl6 which is not the next language, but a new sister language that still has some work in the performance department, but is a very nice language. As a python guy, I would switch to Perl6 in a heartbeat if it were as fast as Perl5. A lot of things from Perl6 were backported to Perl5. All in all, y not choose it? It has a lot of neat developer tools as well.
So 1010data's purpose is to sell analytics tools to kdb+ users? Does kdb+ not come with a simple way to pipe output to a chart? For the price, I'd hope they had something more than a REPL.
Yea, I was just saying the key mappings can be a pain and your favorite keyboard probably doesn't have the APL symbols on it. The Dyalog IDE has a virtual keyboard, but I don't like those too much. If none of that bothers you, than no biggie. I'm guessing Dyalog has more production users and a bit more users than you see at the conference as they are typically held in the UK. J is free, so I bet a lot more people try it even though Dyalog has a free hobby license. J has a nice built in plotting library"viewmat" while Dyalog has sharpleaf. Both are nice, but sharpleaf has a GUI like doing charts in Excel. Dyalog can easily hook-in to .NET, so that is pretty helpful on Windows in the real-world. I'd agree it's a wash right now. What is your background and needs?