Fernando's blog

After the success of last year's Python minisymposium at the annual SIAM meeting, this year we had a repeat: Simula's Hans-Petter Langtangen (author of the well-known Python Scripting for Computational Science ), U. Washington's Randy LeVeque and I co-organized another minisymposium on Python for Scientific computing. At the Computational Science and Engineering 2009 meeting , held in downtown Miami March 2-6, we had again 3 sessions with 4 talks each ( part I , II and III ), with a different mix of speakers and focus than last year. While last year we spent some effort introducing the language and to a certain extent justyfing its use in real-world scientific work, we felt that this time, the growth of the many python projects out there speaks for itself and that we should instead turn our attention to actual tools and projects useful for specific work. Thus, we had no 'why python for science' talk, although obviously most speakers spent some time providing ...

Update : I've slightly modified the language of this review, which as my wife correctly pointed out to me, was unnecessarily harsh. While I stand by my previous evaluation of the book, I think the same things can be said in a more constructive tone. While this isn't strictly a SciPy post, I've already have a few questions about this book, so I guess I'll tag it as 'scipy' as well, for those interested. I recently reviewed the book Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziadé. While not aimed at a scientific audience, the book covers a number of topics that we frequently discuss on the Numpy and Scipy lists (such as documentation and testing, workflows, API decisions, etc). Since I really prefer to write longer text in reST using Emacs than in a blog editor, I've posted the review over at my static site. Feel free to head over there if you are interested in the full review , I've only reproduced here the summary:   Summary Expert Python Progra...