Homogenization of scientific computing – Python is eating other languages’ lunch

Post by bjourne » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 7:35 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #50

pyre wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor (and don't do something like mix spaces and tabs, which I think everyone is in general agreement with across all languages). When was the last time that you manually typed out 4 (or 2, or 8, etc) spaces to indent a line of code vs. just hitting tab and letting the editor handle inserting those spaces (or the editor automatical…

> Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor I never understood that. The whole problem for me is that the indentation being the only thing denoting blocks the editor can't know for sure how things should be indented, since it's not simply cosmetic. I haven't written a whole lot of Python but how do you even refactor python code? In C I can just copy paste a block of c…

Post by baldfat » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 7:48 PM UTC

plg wrote: post #90

Python so slow!!

Post by benhoyt » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 7:50 PM UTC

tokipin wrote: post #86

Xcelerate wrote: post #65

I do scientific computing, and Python is one language I never actually got around to learning for some reason. However, as a long-time hobby, I do have an interest in programming languages so I like exploring things like Haskell, Clojure, Lisp, etc. One language I'm really excited about for scientific computing though is Julia. From a language-design perspective, it's beautiful. It was actually thought out rather tha…

python is a deliberately-straightforward language. i don't see how anyone couldn't become highly proficient in it after writing one or two scripts

    counts = {}
    f = open('test.txt')
    lines = f.read().split('\n')
    for line in lines:
        for word in line.split(' '):
            if word:
                word = word.lower()
                if word in counts.keys():
                    counts[word] += 1
                else:
                    counts[word] = 1
    f.close()
    count_items = [(count, word) for word, count in counts.items()]
    count_items.sort()
    for count, word in reversed(count_items):
        print word, count

    import collections
    counts = collections.Counter()
    with open('test.txt') as f:
        for line in f:
            for word in line.lower().split():
                counts[word] += 1
    for word, count in counts.most_common():
        print word, count

Post by yohanatan » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 8:04 PM UTC

benhoyt wrote: post #95

tokipin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

python is a deliberately-straightforward language. i don't see how anyone couldn't become highly proficient in it after writing one or two scripts

Deliberately-straightforward -- agreed. But "highly proficient" after writing one or two scripts? That's quite a stretch. For instance, one of the questions I give in phone screens is for the candidate to write a program to count the number of occurrences of unique words in a text file. The "after writing one or two Python scripts" approach is something like this: counts = {} f = open('test.txt') lines = f.read().spl…

    def read_words(words_file):
        return [word for line in open(words_file, 'r') for word in line.split()]
    len(set(read_words('test.txt')))

Post by mbq » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 8:09 PM UTC

yohanatan wrote: post #97

benhoyt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deliberately-straightforward -- agreed. But "highly proficient" after writing one or two scripts? That's quite a stretch. For instance, one of the questions I give in phone screens is for the candidate to write a program to count the number of occurrences of unique words in a text file. The "after writing one or two Python scripts" approach is something like this: counts = {} f = open('test.txt') lines = f.read().spl…

Actually that's not 'highly proficient'. This is: def read_words(words_file): return [word for line in open(words_file, 'r') for word in line.split()] len(set(read_words('test.txt')))

    length(unique(scan('test.txt',character(),sep=" ")))