At 05:46 AM 2/6/2014, Alan G Isaac wrote:
Compare np.mat('1 2; 3 4') to np.array([[1, 2], [3, 4]]) for readability and intimidation factor. Little things matter when getting started with students who lack programming background.
my $.02:
'1 2; 3 4' is a non-obvious and non-intuitive way to describe a 2D array or matrix - and try explaining later that the values are actually stored in memory as 1,3,2,4 and why and watch the freshman chins drop...
np.array([[1,2], ... [3,4]]) ... array([[1, 2], [3, 4]]) Why use both significant whitespace and punctuation to separate elements?
I've billed many months rewriting old Matlab code into Python - please don't saddle future engineers with a closed, non-objective, expensive product based on FORTRAN and written in C that breaks old code with every release. </rant> There are so many fine, easy tutorials like http://wiki.scipy.org/Tentative_NumPy_Tutorial http://www.loria.fr/~rougier/teaching/matplotlib/ - Ray