dolfin team mailing list archive

["Lorenzo Isella" <lorenzo.isella@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear All,
I have just noticed the existence of a Debian/Ubuntu packages for
Dolfin and I decided that I would like to give it a try.
I have a few questions, which are not intended to give rise to a flame-war.
1)Can I use Dolfin as an almost complete replacement of commercial fem
packages like e.g. Comsol Multyphyisics?
2)Is it correct that if I "just" want to focus on getting equations
solved, I should mainly concentrate upon Dolfin and I can bypass for
now the other bits of the Fenics project? If not, I think I am in the
wrong list.
3)My background is in functional programming and I am mainly
experienced in Fortran, R, some Python and with a rather superficial
knowledge of C and C++.
I thought, after browsing through the tutorial
(http://www.fenics.org/wiki/Tutorial), that I would be nice to use the
Python interface to Dolfin (it could make life significantly easier
for me than using a low-level language I know rather little of).
However, Dolfin tutorial
(http://www.fenics.org/pub/documents/dolfin/dolfin-user-manual/dolfin-user-manual.pdf),
seems to discuss everything in terms of C++. I appreciate that for
many on this list it is probably trivial to migrate any C++ example
into e.g. Python, but that is not the case for me. Where can I find
anything similar but targeted to a Python rather than a C++ user?
This insistence on Python is due to its being more high level and the
Poisson example as a  Python script looks way shorter to code than its
C++ counterpart.

I would have plenty of other questions, but these are to me the
fundamental points right now.
Many thanks for any answers/suggestions

Lorenzo