{"id":92,"date":"2011-06-01T11:36:39","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T18:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/?p=92"},"modified":"2012-04-19T22:29:56","modified_gmt":"2012-04-20T05:29:56","slug":"python-for-astronomy-follow-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/01\/python-for-astronomy-follow-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Python for Astronomy Follow-Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My post outlining the reasons why <a href=\"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/27\/why-astronomers-should-program-in-python\/\">I think Python should be the language of choice in astronomy today<\/a> got a lot more attention than I expected thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=2592168\">discussion on Hacker News<\/a> and a <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/gvanrossum\/status\/74507150981996544\">link from Guido himself<\/a>.? <a href=\"https:\/\/secure.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/wiki\/Status_quo_bias\">Psychological factors <\/a>encourage particular attachment to one&#8217;s tool choices, but the discussion has been constructive.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/01\/python-for-astronomy-follow-up\/screen-shot-2011-06-01-at-11-16-44-am\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-113\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"131\" class=\" wp-image-113 aligncenter\" title=\"BDFL\" src=\"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/Screen-shot-2011-06-01-at-11.16.44-AM-300x131.png\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/Screen-shot-2011-06-01-at-11.16.44-AM-300x131.png 300w, http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/Screen-shot-2011-06-01-at-11.16.44-AM.png 478w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Some commenters noted that Python adoption by astronomers is widespread and accelerating.? Certainly the community is larger and the available libraries? more mature today than when I transitioned to Python in 2008.? Having recently seen new students being encouraged to develop in IDL, however, I think there&#8217;s a need for advocacy to capitalize on the momentum of astronomical Python.<\/p>\n<p>Other researchers, mostly in other fields, made the case for their own preferred languages.? In my view, none are as suitable today as Python for adoption in astronomy.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>As scripting languages, Perl and Ruby are similar to Python.? Perl&#8217;s syntax is not particularly beginner friendly, though, and it can be a &#8220;write-only&#8221; language&#8211;poor for scientific collaboration.?? For historical reasons, there are currently fewer astronomical libraries in Ruby.<\/li>\n<li>MATLAB shares the major disadvantages of IDL: it&#8217;s a proprietary language built around an array data type.? While widely used in engineering, it has little installed base in astronomy.<\/li>\n<li>For those in high-energy particle physics, C++ and the <a href=\"http:\/\/root.cern.ch\/\">ROOT libraries<\/a> are a necessity.? Having worked extensively with Monte Carlo software built on this stack, I can attest that their power comes with a steep learning curve.? I suspect even students planning to work with accelerator-scale data would be well-served if they started learning programming with basic Python scripting.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=2592702\">A comment<\/a> on Hacker News summarized nicely the strength of Python as an all-purpose language gluing together scientific analysis:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">SciPy\/NumPy, PyROOT, PyFITS are all unbeatable tools for anything in Physics or Astronomy as far as I&#8217;m concerned. Throw some knowledge of C in with that, and you can scale anything up to supercomputing clusters or back down to your laptop, and that&#8217;s a very important, powerful thing for a scientist.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My post outlining the reasons why I think Python should be the language of choice in astronomy today got a lot more attention than I expected thanks to discussion on Hacker News and a link from Guido himself.? Psychological factors encourage particular attachment to one&#8217;s tool choices, but the discussion has been constructive. Some commenters [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":308,"href":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bellm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}