suitability of python

[Stefan Behnel]

Rudra Banerjee, 24.11.2011 12:31:
> 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?

You already got a lot of answers that pointed you to the scientific 
computing tools that are available for Python. The reason why they exist is 
because (and nowadays also "why") Python is so extremely popular in that 
field: it's an easy to learn and use language and the standard 
implementation (often referred to as CPython) makes it really easy to 
interface with external code (C/C++/Fortran/etc.) in a very efficient way.

In addition to looking at NumPy/SciPy and/or Sage (depending on the kind of 
computations you are involved with), you should also look at fwrap and 
Cython. They will allow you to easily wrap your existing Fortran code for 
Python, and to quickly write very fast glue code for the two language 
environments. Thus, you can keep your existing code as it is, and use and 
control it from Python, using all the nice tools that Python provides for 
quickly writing anything from distributed code and test suites to graphical 
user interfaces for visualising your data. Since you specifically asked 
about plotting, don't miss out on matplotlib.

Stefan