I've discovered Python and have been trying it out lately as a possible replacement for computations that would ordinarily be done with a commercial package like Matlab or IDL. I'd like to mention a few things I've run across that have either surprised me or kept me from doing things the way I'd like to.
1) -There's a large and active sci/tech Python community out there.- This was something of a surprise. If you look at the python.org site and click down a couple of levels past the front page, there's a rather brief mention of scientific and numeric applications-- but I don't think this does justice to the current levels of activity and accomplishment. 2) -There's a very impressive set of libraries out there- NumPy, SciPy, Enthought. It's really kind of stunning how mature these libraries are and how much I had to poke around to figure that out. 3) -There's a problem with development under Windows. A typical task will entail writing a 'pure python' prototype to get the 'data in, data out' part of a problem straightened out, then writing a module in C to get adequate performance in production runs. But the C compiler that my employer provides (the current version of MSVS) doesn't produce libraries that work with the current version of Python. Ooops. This, in the real world, is a big problem. I -love- Python. And I think I could convince other people to use it. But I've got to have a way to produce compiled modules painlessly, i.e., without installing a new operating system. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
