2008 – Year of the Python (for me anyway)
Over the years I have programmed in a reasonable number of languages but the ones I am actually using right now are Fortran, C++, Mathematica, Matlab and Perl. The one I would choose would depend on what I needed to accomplish, maybe Fotran for high speed numerics, Matlab for quick numerical algorithm development or Perl for sysadmin work and for the most part this tool-set serves my purposes well.
Just recently, however, I have been getting itchy feet and have been wanting to learn another programming language as it is a process I quite enjoy and last time I did it (with Perl) it turned out to be pretty useful. The question, of course, is which one to choose? I want a language that is going to be fun to use (to keep up my interest) and useful in my day job (so I can justify the time spent).
For me, one language stuck out more than all of the others – Python. I have always been dimly aware of it but until recently you could summarize my knowledge of it as follows
- It’s free
- It’s not a traditional compiled language (like C or Fortran) – it uses bytecodes and a virtual machine like Java
- It’s the one where white space matters
- Perl and Python people argue a lot
More recently, however, I have discovered a few more things about it piqued my interest.
- The open source CAS system – SAGE – is implemented in Python
- There are mature python libraries for doing numerical computing – numpy and scipy
- There is a wonderful looking matlab-like plotting library for it – matplotlib
- There are a lot of scientific applications developed using it
- I can install it on my mobile phone
- There is a number-theoretic (another emerging interest I have) library for it – NZMATH
So python it is then. Although there are a lot of great looking python tutorials on the web, I prefer to do my learning from a book, I am showing my age I guess. When I was learning Perl I used the O’Reilly book, learning perl
