11–15 of 15 posts
I have added an addendum to the bottom of the list promoting the Enthought distribution (http://www.enthought.com/) of Python, which includes most (maybe all) of these packages in a single distribution.
I used numpy for all my numerical analysis homework. The professor always lauded me for having the most concise code in the class.
I wonder how large the proportion of social scientists is who actually know that Python is a programming language. (I am a social scientist myself). In my own experience, it is already pretty hard to teach them R.
Many of the students and academics from the older engineering fields (e.g. mechanical, chemical) don't know of python either. When I tell them (python + numpy + scipy + matplotlib) is as potent as MatLAB for most situations, and far more flexible and generalizable later, most don't believe me. They get started faster with MatLAB, then struggle later with its constraints, and end up creating overly-specialized, one-of…
Programming is becoming an essential tool for scientists and engineers and it isn't taught it enough. Interestingly my mother was taught Pascal back in the day when she went back to Uni to study Environmental Science as an undergrad, looking back on it I am most impressed.
simplejson is included in the standard library as json now. Yes, cjson is faster, but it's also more fragile and, well, less standardized. Everything but simplejson is effectively dead: simplejson won the json library wars.
html5lib is an odd choice for a new HTML parsing kit. lxml.html offers its own fast and good HTML parser, and can also use html5lib or BeautifulSoup as its backend while still producing an Element tree with plenty of convenience methods (like xpath). I am not sure why html5lib would be better here (maybe it's not as complicated, somehow?)
As for MySQLdb, that thing is awful. There are some replacements out there, and out of them my personal preference is for oursql. The creator/maintainer is a regular (an op, actually) on the #python IRC channel, so it's easy to get support, and it fixes a lot of the nasty quirks of MySQLdb.
His first four suggested libraries are definitely good, though
http://docs.python.org/library/json.html http://simplejson.googlecode.com/svn/tags/simplejson-2.1.0/d...
http://codespeak.net/lxml/lxmlhtml.html http://codespeak.net/lxml/elementsoup.html http://codespeak.net/lxml/html5parser.html
EDIT: checked the date, the article is from 2008. I guess that explains things. :)