Why Python rocks for research
stat.washington.edu
Why Python rocks for research
1–10 of 103 posts
Re: Why Python rocks for research
#2I learned Python on the fly specifically for research. I used Django to build out an enterprise reporting/analytics system to support a customer experience (survey) program for the cost of time (huzzah open source). We had bids on this project upwards of 80k. We generate ~100k surveys / month and are able to get targeted, meaningful, automated insights directly to front-line management. Python FTW.
Re: Why Python rocks for research
#3This article makes some fairly convincing arguments that Python is a more flexible tool than Matlab or Perl, but I can't help but come away with the sense that the author hasn't tried many other languages.
There are an awful lot of languages that provide iterators, a powerful set of data structures, extensive libraries and facilities for structuring and maintaining large codebases. .Net languages (maybe F# would be good for this?), Java or most of the emerging languages for the JVM stack, Ruby (which is generally considered to be "different but equivalent" to Python), and so forth.
Re: Why Python rocks for research
#4Python rocks, but Python + R + bash rocks way harder for research
Re: Why Python rocks for research
#5This article makes some fairly convincing arguments that Python is a more flexible tool than Matlab or Perl, but I can't help but come away with the sense that the author hasn't tried many other languages. There are an awful lot of languages that provide iterators, a powerful set of data structures, extensive libraries and facilities for structuring and maintaining large codebases. .Net languages (maybe F# would be g…
> There are an awful lot of languages that provide ...
Still, how many of them have a fast interactive interpreter ("command line") with a decent usability? How many of those provide good libraries for numerical as well as symbolic math? With an API that is easy to write, to understand and to extend?
Python may not be the only language with those qualities, but there aren't many languages (and ecosystems around them) which can compete on all those areas.
Python seems to be one one the few "best fits" for scientific applications.
Re: Why Python rocks for research
#6This article makes some fairly convincing arguments that Python is a more flexible tool than Matlab or Perl, but I can't help but come away with the sense that the author hasn't tried many other languages. There are an awful lot of languages that provide iterators, a powerful set of data structures, extensive libraries and facilities for structuring and maintaining large codebases. .Net languages (maybe F# would be g…
I only scanned the article very briefly, but my impression is that the important comparison is vs. Matlab. The other players aren't really in the author's game. It's a question of the use case and the community and the library support.
In theory, .Net could displace Matlab or Python as the canonical platform for scientific researchers. And in theory Python could displace PHP as the canonical platform for classic CRUD web apps. In practice neither is likely to happen, no matter how much we might or might not wish it to.
Re: Why Python rocks for research
#7This article makes some fairly convincing arguments that Python is a more flexible tool than Matlab or Perl, but I can't help but come away with the sense that the author hasn't tried many other languages. There are an awful lot of languages that provide iterators, a powerful set of data structures, extensive libraries and facilities for structuring and maintaining large codebases. .Net languages (maybe F# would be g…
Do they all have equivalent libraries to python's scipy and matplotlib? I think that is why the author could move to python as these provide a pretty large subset of what matlab has and makes the transition less problematic.
Java probably does and .NET may have something like this but I don't know of them or their amount of documentation.
Re: Why Python rocks for research
#8In the end, it's all about the ecosystem. Perl wins for bioinformatics because there are boatloads of scientists already using it, with all the neat libraries and resources that brings. Equally, Python wins for, say, prototyping in robotics because of libraries, support and so on.
There's nothing intrinsically science-apt about Python/Perl, but Ruby and friends can't compete when it comes to the programming environment; that's what counts.
Re: Why Python rocks for research
#9Python rocks, but Python + R + bash rocks way harder for research
R is definitely powerful and a good part of any scientific data analysis toolkit.
I use python, ipython, matplotlib, numpy and R. I call my R scripts directly from python using rpy.
Re: Why Python rocks for research
#10This article makes some fairly convincing arguments that Python is a more flexible tool than Matlab or Perl, but I can't help but come away with the sense that the author hasn't tried many other languages. There are an awful lot of languages that provide iterators, a powerful set of data structures, extensive libraries and facilities for structuring and maintaining large codebases. .Net languages (maybe F# would be g…
I only scanned the article very briefly, but my impression is that the important comparison is vs. Matlab. The other players aren't really in the author's game. It's a question of the use case and the community and the library support. In theory, .Net could displace Matlab or Python as the canonical platform for scientific researchers. And in theory Python could displace PHP as the canonical platform for classic CRUD…
I've been a Matlab user for 10 yrs, recently switched to python because of the increased flexibility. never going back to Matlab ever again. Python math and science libs can be a little rough around the edges, but the flexibility more than makes up for it for me.