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Array Programming with NumPy

nature.com

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Re: Array Programming with NumPy

#2

Post by alextheparrot »

As someone who cut his teeth on bioinformatics before eventually just completing a full computer science degree, I was a bit worried that this article wouldn’t address the applied scientific audience well. Pleasantly surprised, though, at how well this article evangelizes NumPy to that exact community.

Many labs are gaining access to or creating physical tools that create data analysis over experimental design problems. Biologists transitioning from running gels to detect the existence of a gene to running sequencing or flow cytometry to segment populations, for example. I remember seeing I think an RNA-seq experiment that tracked the full lineage of hematopoietic (blood) stem cells by a professor - my jaw was on the floor at the level of insight.

One remaining step is transitioning many bioinformatics courses from applied tooling to general program design and open-sourcing. I’ve noticed a few labs have done that really well for years, but it is not often found as a field-level skillset.

Re: Array Programming with NumPy

#4

Post by ddavis »

teorema wrote: post #3

For some reason this struck me as inappropriate for the outlet. It's a nice piece as an introduction to array programming with numpy, but seemed out of place to me.

If, going forward, 5% of all papers that use NumPy to get their results actually cite this paper, it will be one of Nature's most cited papers every year.

Re: Array Programming with NumPy

#5

Post by rubatuga »

alextheparrot wrote: post #2

As someone who cut his teeth on bioinformatics before eventually just completing a full computer science degree, I was a bit worried that this article wouldn’t address the applied scientific audience well. Pleasantly surprised, though, at how well this article evangelizes NumPy to that exact community. Many labs are gaining access to or creating physical tools that create data analysis over experimental design proble…

The coolest thing I read last year was about single cell rna-seq trajectory analysis of the differentiation for different blood cells.

Re: Array Programming with NumPy

#9

Post by throrthaway »

microcow wrote: post #7
throrthaway wrote: post #6

Ah, just the right time to publish about numpy - right when everyone is moving over to Julia because of numpy's warts.

I don't think that's accurate: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Relieved to know I can still trust HNers to always take hyperbolic statements literally

Re: Array Programming with NumPy

#10

Post by lumost »

ddavis wrote: post #4
teorema wrote: post #3

For some reason this struck me as inappropriate for the outlet. It's a nice piece as an introduction to array programming with numpy, but seemed out of place to me.

If, going forward, 5% of all papers that use NumPy to get their results actually cite this paper, it will be one of Nature's most cited papers every year.

There's an interesting trend of what content gets published in peer-reviewed journals vs. blogs/github/etc. I suspect there is an audience segment that strongly values peer reviewed pieces that are equivalent content wise to introductory material in a variety of formats.

I wonder if github should add a "Review" feature to provide a similar content authoring experience.

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