python a bust?

[Andrew Dalke]

Brandon J. Van Every:
> Apple almost went under and is a decided minority computing platform
today.

I work in strange subfields by general computing standards:

Up until a year or two ago, computational chemisty was dominated by
IRIX.  Linux has mostly replaced, except for some very high end
visualization (game graphics cards still have problems with lots of
triangle - they prefer textures, and the drivers for stereo displays are
still poor, esp. for stereo-in-a-window support).  Though non-
computational chemisty (eg, compound registration and database
searches) is done on MS Windows, which has some quite excellent
ActiveX plug-ins for compound display.  Still, one of my clients
has an SGI Octane *and* an NT box on the comp. chemists'
desktops.

Bioinformatics used to be Solaris for the server and Linux for
the development machines, but OS X has made suprising in-roads
for developer machines.  (That's what I use.)  Linux is replacing
Solaris for many of the servers, excepting some high-end ones
(large memory, many processors).  Most of the bioinformatics
apps are web-based and don't require plug-ins so are quite
portable.

At the last bioinformatics open-source software developer meeting
I went to, everyone was running either Linux or OS X.  People
booted into MS Windows mostly to check comptability.

And of course Python works wonderfully on all those platforms.  :)

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com