Simulation Programming Skills and Python

[Lonnie Princehouse]

Object oriented languages lend themselves fairly well to this sort of
modeling, and a strong programmer in any language should be able to
take a good description of a well thought-out model and write some code
for it.

However, by far the harder part is designing a good model.  Asking
whether all programmers are capable of that is sort of like asking
whether all carpenters are architects.

As for Python, it's a good language for prototyping.  The development
cycle moves very fast, so one can experiment with many different ideas
more quickly than in Java or C++.  The price, however, is execution
speed. There are extension modules like the scipy suite which can
reclaim some lost speed, but Python will generally be slower than
compiled languages.