RE: [Numpy-discussion] A message from Cameron Laird

Thought I'd reply to all since I'm including some links that are possibly interesting to the list:

-----Original Message----- From: numpy-discussion-admin@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:numpy-discussion-admin@lists.sourceforge.net]On Behalf Of Konrad Hinsen Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 12:04 PM To: numpy-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Numpy-discussion] A message from Cameron Laird

I send this on behalf of Cameron Laird . Please reply to him, not to me.

I have at least a couple of assignments from magazines such as IBM's developerWorks to report on matters that involve Numeric. I'd welcome contact from anyone here who wants to publicize his or her work with Python and Numeric.

The SciPy Toolkit (http://www.scipy.org) attacks Matlab's functionality head-on--providing much of the functional interface symantics that Matlab provides and much much more. It is a stated goal of many in the SciPy development community to eliminate the need for Matlab altogether by providing a tool that offers _all_ the functionality and better performance (among many other things) in an open-source, truly object-oriented package.

I have a particular interest in advantages Python and Numeric enjoy over such alternatives as Mathematica, IDL, SAS/IML, MATLAB, and so on, all of which are more narrowly targeted at the kinds of scientific and engineering problems tackled by contributors to this mailing list. What does Python do for you that the commercial products don't?

I suspect that many of you will mention, in one form or another, Python's aptness for programming "in the large". Do you have specific examples of how this is clumsy in MATLAB, Mathematica, and so on?

Have you tried to interface MATLAB and so on to hardware instrumentation or other external data sources?

The recent SciPy '02 workshop (http://www.scipy.org/site_content/scipy02) had some presented material that tangentially addressed interfacing Matlab and Mathematica (perhaps even in a bof, I've slept since then). You might try the scipy-user mailing list as well. (Presentations: http://www.scipy.org/site_content/scipy02/presentations , Mailing list: http://www.scipy.org/site_content/MailList)

How do the scientists and engineers (as opposed to the "informaticians" or software developers) on your teams accept Python, compared to IDL and friends? Do scientists at your site program?

Is there anything Python's missing in its competition with MATLAB and so on?

The aforementioned workshop included a survey that addressed these issues as well. You can look at the aggregated results by following the link below (it's a little raw in its layout, let me know if there is a question about how to interpret some things). http://www.scipy.org/site_content/scipy02/survey_results.htm (note: some questions were 'pick one' and others were 'pick all that apply'--the total number of surveys turned in was 36, I think.)

Cameron Laird +1 281 996 8546 FAX http://phaseit.net/claird/misc.writing/publications.html