[Chicago] Introduce Yourself

[T Wilson]

i just started playing win Linux last year.  Now I'm trying to learn more
and more about coding and more.

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 10:07 PM, Brian Toby <Brian.Toby at anl.gov> wrote:

> On Oct 1, 2012, at 3:00 PM, Kevin Harriss wrote:
>
> an Introduction thread would be a good...
>
>
> Hi, I have been lurking on this ML for a bit more than a year, but don't
> venture into Chicago that often, so it might well be a while before I make
> it to a meeting, but they usually sound pretty tempting. I will rise to
> Kevin's challenge and de-cloak long enough to introduce myself.
>
> I am an experimental scientist (a crystallographer) who uses computers for
> much of my work. Over the years, I have done a lot of programming, which
> has ranged from hand-assembled code for a 4K PDP-8 to learning and using a
> lot more languages than I care to think about. About 15 years ago, I
> discovered the advantages of coding in script languages and started doing
> most of my coding in Tcl/Tk. About 5 years ago I started using Python to
> automate a scientific instrument at the Argonne synchrotron. (For geeks
> only: see a Python-driven robot and diffractometer at
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86TZpk_Tn1M).
>
> Writing code is only one of the things that I do, but I am involved in
> rewriting in Python a very widely used large [Fortran] code for
> crystallography that also has a freestanding [Tcl/Tk] GUI. What we are
> finding is that NumPy and SciPy allow computations to run at speeds as fast
> as Fortran (and where they don't and it matters, we use F2Py to wrap short
> Fortran routines), but the length of the resulting code is much much more
> compact and the time needed to write that code is much less. In a year or
> so we have duplicated and surpassed much of what took originally more than
> a decade. I do spend a lot of my time prosthelytizing use of Python and
> helping my coworkers get started with it.
>
> Brian
>
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>
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