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Why Python rocks for research

stat.washington.edu

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Re: Why Python rocks for research

#71

Post by djacobs »

cageface wrote: post #57
phren0logy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer Ruby generally, but honestly Ruby and Python are sufficiently similar that I'd rather smart programmers put their time to good use doing something other than reimplementing Python's science libs. I think that making some tools available in a totally different language (maybe something functional) would be much more useful, because it would allow for a very different approach to the problem if needed. In a pe…

Agreed. There's only so much skilled labor available for this kind of thing. This is exactly why I'm focusing on Python lately. Ruby is a great language but I don't want to be pigeon-holed as a web guy forever. I've already done over 10 years of web dev and I'd like to try out a couple of new problem domains before I kick the bucket.

I'll have to agree as well. The only problem for me is: if not on the web, how are we going to make GUIs that aren't severely limited to our platform? Wasn't web design supposed to solve the "platform question"?

Re: Why Python rocks for research

#72

Post by maurits »

I feel this article is somewhat unbalanced in its single minded rejoice for a certain tool/environment. So in the same spirit here come a couple of reasons not to switch from Matlab to Python, all stemming from my experience when I decided to try to switch from Matlab to Python/C

- installing all these packages on (any) system is painful. Different versions don't play together or don't work (yet) on some platform and or architecture. This stems from my own experience of getting a version of python to work with numpy, scipy, matplotlib, opencv and PIL on a windows, mac, and linux machine. No 100 percent success yet on any platform.

- central and consistent documentation. Even for very simple cases, I got a bit of a headache. I encounter a python print statement for the first time that obviously differs somewhat from its c printf cousin. I google "python print syntax" only to find that the first xx hits, including the official documentation, do not cover the full specification of this statement. I fear the moment I might actually need detailed information on something less trivial.

- Numerical integration is more accurate in Matlab.

- Visualization capabilities of matlab are more powerful. But who knows, perhaps there is yet another package floating around :-)

- Matlab may not have advanced data-structures, but it is a rapid prototyping tool, for testing ideas. If I need to write an actual application, I will use a tool and language geared for that task.

Re: Why Python rocks for research

#74

Post by maurits »

hogu wrote: post #60
rdouble wrote: post #46

I've wasted most of my professional life tweaking various unix software to make it work. However, the typical scientific python setup proved to be too frustrating to install on OSX. The recommended solution is to just buy the Enthought distro. If I'm paying for software anyway, why is Enthought better than Matlab?

disclaimer I work for enthought I did my whole phd in matlab. EPD is much cheaper and is free for academics even if it weren't free, I would use it anyways. but it really isn't why is EPD better than matlab, it's why python is better than matlab. matlab is a domain specific application with a domain specific language. It doesn't work well with things outside of its domain. python is a general purpose language (And as…

Thanks for the reply, I am checking out the academic enthought lib. now

Re: Why Python rocks for research

#75

Post by koenigdavidmj »

dagw wrote: post #33
sintesoro wrote: post #21

Python is good, you could also consider Maxima. A single example: f(x):= x^2+3 x+7; Maxima provides: Symbolic computation, blas and laplack integration for numeric algebra, 500 pages manual in several languages, a complete library for statistics, differential equation, calculus, series. Graphics with matplotllib. Also maxima language is not much complicate that python: for i in range(10):print i i versus for i:0 thru…

Python has sage and sympy for doing symbolic math. Although admittedly they're quite primitive compared to maple and mathematica (haven't used Maxima, so I can't really compare)

Sage actually includes Maxima, for ultimate convenience.

Re: Why Python rocks for research

#76

Post by xiongchiamiov »

maurits wrote: post #72

I feel this article is somewhat unbalanced in its single minded rejoice for a certain tool/environment. So in the same spirit here come a couple of reasons not to switch from Matlab to Python, all stemming from my experience when I decided to try to switch from Matlab to Python/C - installing all these packages on (any) system is painful. Different versions don't play together or don't work (yet) on some platform and…

> central and consistent documentation. Even for very simple cases, I got a bit of a headache. I encounter a python print statement for the first time that obviously differs somewhat from its c printf cousin. I google "python print syntax" only to find that the first xx hits, including the official documentation, do not cover the full specification of this statement. I fear the moment I might actually need detailed information on something less trivial.

http://docs.python.org/reference/simple_stmts.html#the-print... lists eveything about `print` - it takes stuff in, converts 'em to strings, and sticks in on stdout. It doesn't refer to prinf-like formatting because that's for strings in general. If you weren't aware of this, you probably should have been going through a basic Python tutorial, rather than just jumping into the middle of things.

Python's documentation is the best I've encountered so far, and I find good docs to be an important value in the community, as well. I guess YMMV, though.

Re: Why Python rocks for research

#77

Post by xiongchiamiov »

djacobs wrote: post #71
cageface wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There's only so much skilled labor available for this kind of thing. This is exactly why I'm focusing on Python lately. Ruby is a great language but I don't want to be pigeon-holed as a web guy forever. I've already done over 10 years of web dev and I'd like to try out a couple of new problem domains before I kick the bucket.

I'll have to agree as well. The only problem for me is: if not on the web, how are we going to make GUIs that aren't severely limited to our platform? Wasn't web design supposed to solve the "platform question"?

There are a number of cross-platform GUI toolkits. For instance, QT is pretty nice wherever you put it, and KDE's been putting a lot of work into making their libraries and such work on Windows.

Re: Why Python rocks for research

#78

Post by xiongchiamiov »

mfukar wrote: post #56
njharman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Code should not be Documentation. Code is for humans to read, that it compiles/interprets to a program is a side effect. Otherwise we'd all be passing around binaries (or byte encoded files) with our thick stacks of documentation.

What's your take on the multitude of software that you buy together with all the README files, Word or PDF documents describing how to use the software, what does it do, and all that jazz? Do we (humans) get to view all that code and see what Microsoft Office Word 2007 can do for us?

> Do we (humans) get to view all that code and see what Microsoft Office Word 2007 can do for us?

Well, we should be able to, but no, we can't, precisely because we don't get code - we get binaries.

Re: Why Python rocks for research

#79

Post by hogu »

maurits wrote: post #72

I feel this article is somewhat unbalanced in its single minded rejoice for a certain tool/environment. So in the same spirit here come a couple of reasons not to switch from Matlab to Python, all stemming from my experience when I decided to try to switch from Matlab to Python/C - installing all these packages on (any) system is painful. Different versions don't play together or don't work (yet) on some platform and…

install is painful - enthought python distribution does make it pretty painless, but its not free for non-academics

agreed on documentation

actually I think python's visualization capabilities are more powerful, have you looked at mlab? the 3d capabilities there are insane

I use python because I can do rapid prototyping, and turn it into a full application with the same code base.

did you ultimately go back to matlab?

Re: Why Python rocks for research

#80

Post by djacobs »

xiongchiamiov wrote: post #77
djacobs wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll have to agree as well. The only problem for me is: if not on the web, how are we going to make GUIs that aren't severely limited to our platform? Wasn't web design supposed to solve the "platform question"?

There are a number of cross-platform GUI toolkits. For instance, QT is pretty nice wherever you put it, and KDE's been putting a lot of work into making their libraries and such work on Windows.

I'm not a huge fan of Qt simply because I can't get it to feel natural on Gnome, my desktop of choice. I've looked into Gtk+, but I'm not so sure I want to commit to it yet.

Are there plans to make Qt feel more natural on Gnome and OS X?

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