[Edu-sig] Progamming advice

kirby urner kirby.urner at gmail.com
Wed Apr 8 06:25:44 CEST 2009


On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 7:12 PM, David MacQuigg <macquigg at ece.arizona.edu> wrote:
> At 09:35 AM 4/7/2009 -0400, Gary Pajer wrote:

<< SNIP >>

> Send me some examples of early versions of your programs, and I'll help make them into a sequence that will serve as good examples for students.  See the sequence OhNo.py for what I have in mind.  This example is a bit artificial, but perhaps some of your real-world programs could be the basis of something much better.
>
> -- Dave

I'm eager for Dave's proposed course (and course ware) to flourish,
especially if he continues being so generous with his PDFs etc.

So true that working non computer scientists might benefit from a
"best practices" course.  There should be no stigma around sharing
draft code, what liberal cultures encourage.

Lots of people stop themselves saying:  I don't want to publish code
others might criticize.  But that's the whole point:  flag the code as
a work in progress and invite comments, suggestions.  This is how we
learn.

As R0ml Lefkowitz points out, free as in freedom is where "liberal
arts" come in, with software skills becoming the "new rhetoric" in
some ways.

http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2008/07/more-oscon-keynotes.html

>>> Random observations re scientific computing w/ Python:

The SciPy site has a lot of materials geared for the scientist needing
to get work done (yeah, some of those links are broken.

http://www.scipy.org/Topical_Software

http://www.scipy.org/wikis/topical_software/Tutorial
(long and detailed, lots of work directly in the shell which I like)

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/
is scary to me, such a hodge podge.

Anyone in the habit of using Bruce BTW?
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bruce/3.2.1

PyMOL doesn't seem as accessible as I remember, documentation only for
subscribers:
http://pymol.sourceforge.net/

I'm out of date on Numpy but have it as a consequence of compiling
Visual Python:
http://numpy.scipy.org/
http://vpython.org/

Kirby


More information about the Edu-sig mailing list