suitability of python

[Terry Reedy]

On 11/24/2011 7:31 AM, Rudra Banerjee wrote:
> Dear friends,
> I am a newbie in python and basically i use python for postprocessing
> like plotting, data manipulation etc.
> Based on ease of programming on python I am wondering if I can consider
> it for the main development as well. My jobs (written on fortran) runs
> for weeks and quite CPU intensive. How python works on these type of
> heavy computation?

The first killer app for Python was running Fortran code from within 
Python. People use Python for both pre- and post-processing. For small 
jobs, this enabled running Fortran interactively.

This lead to Numerical Python, now Numpy, SciPy, and later Sage and 
other scientific and Python packages. I believe SciPy has an f2py 
(fortran to py) module to help with running Fortran under Python (but it 
has been years since I read the details).

Detailed questions might get better answers on, for instance, a scipy list.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy