Scientific Computing and Mac OS X

[GravityGuy]

I haven't searched the entire forum for a similar topic but I haven't seen it come up lately, but this is of interest to me and perhaps many.

Since Apple decided to put the Mac on a Unix platform, I can only imagine the academic community (science and engineering in particular) may have embraced it even more than before. MathCad version 6 for the Mac was available at one time, but aren't there reasonable alternatives. Given the fact that *nix programs can be ported rather easily, that additional tools like Perl, Python, Java, PHP, and other open-source development environments are available, that most web servers are *nix boxes running Apache, I would think this is a natural choice over the MS Windows system.

I don't want to start a religious war between operating systems here, that's not my intent. I am a longtime MS user and developer. I wrote a lot of Fortran programs and recently decided to rewrite my entire gravity processing system in C++, no gui interface was required. I stayed with the Standard Template Library and easily ported it to Linux and the Mac under Darwin. It works great.

A lot of people started learning computing from Visual Basic. It was a wondrous event when you got to see your first gui program compile and run. The Mac, unless it was an AppleScript program, did not have a user-friendly app development system, IMHO, until fairly recently. I finally purchased an iMac with Mac OS X Leopard last year and I've been learning the Xcode, Objective-C, and Cocoa system. I'm finding it similar but also superior to .net in many ways. I am also able to build apps for the iPhone with the same skills investment.

So my question to all who care to give their 'two-cents' is: With Apple's move to Intel hardware and a Unix foundation, has the time finally come that we will see more mainstream use of Macs in the marketplace and the preferred platform for many more areas of study. Example: I attended an amateur astronomy dark skies event and listened to many guest speakers who were either professional astronomers or amateurs interested in photography or minor planet hunting. Almost without exception, everyone had chosen the Mac platform. What is your experience?

[MPD78]

I can't speak for the hardcore developers but in the analysis world of fluid simulations I think the UNIX system will start to become a powerful player in the United States. The reason for this is simply cost. For example, in the United States, the company named ANSYS owns the corvette of fluid simulation codes which goes by the name of FLUENT and the update fees alone will make you cringe. A fellow analyst has 32 licenses of FLUENT and his update fees are incredibly high. Where if he were using a UNIX setup he could use an open-source program called OPEN FOAM which is nice and powerful and overall will make you a better analyst since you must be more intune with continuum mechanics and have minimal (if any) update fees.
I think if you increase the number of people being familiar with UNIX through the use of MACs then overall, the UNIX system will become less taboo in the US. This increase could become exponential if all (or just many) of our students begin leaving US universities with great familiarity with UNIX and therefore will cause their employers to head into a UNIX environment.
At least when I told my employer that we could do fluid simulations for free and he got up off the floor, he was much more open to know more about UNIX.

Theres my input. Hope it helped.

Matt