Scientific computing in Python

Scientific computing in Python is expanding and maturing rapidly. Last week at the SciPy 2015 conference there were about twice as many people as when I'd last gone to the conference in 2013.

You can get some idea of the rapid develop of the scientific Python stack and its future direction by watching the final keynote of the conference by Jake VanderPlas.

I used Python for a while before I discovered that there were so many Python libraries for scientific computing. At the time I was considering learning Ruby or some other scripting language, but I committed to Python when I found out that Python has far more libraries for the kind of work I do than other languages do. It felt like I'd discovered a secret hoard of code. I expect it would be easier today to discover the scientific Python stack. (It really is becoming more of an integrated stack, not just a collection of isolated libraries. This is one of the themes in the keynote above.)

When people ask me why I use Python, rather than languages like Matlab or R, my response is that I do a mixture of mathematical programming and general programming. I'd rather do mathematics in a general programming language than do general programming in a mathematical language.

One of the drawbacks of Python, relative to C++ and related languages, is speed. This is a problem in languages like R as well. However, with Python there are ways to speed up code without completely rewriting it, such as Cython and Numba. The only reliable way I've found to make R much faster, is to rewrite it in another language.

Another drawback of Python until recently was that data manipulation and exploration were not as convenient as one would hope. However, that has changed due to developments such as Pandas, initiated by Wes McKinney. For more on how that came to be and where it's going, see his keynote from the second day of SciPy 2015.

It's not clear why Python has become the language of choice for so many people in scientific computing. Maybe if people like Travis Oliphant had decided to use some other language for scientific programming years ado, we'd all be using that language now. Python wasn't intended to be a scientific programming language. And as Jake VanderPlas points out in his keynote, Python still is not a scientific programming language, but the foundation for a scientific programming stack. Maybe Python's strength is that it's not a scientific language. It has drawn more computer scientists to contribute to the core language than it would have if it had been more of a domain-specific language.

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If you'd like help moving to the Python stack, please let me know.