Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

>also Python is so well entrenched as the successor to Fortran in the scientific computing space

Uhhh... no. FORTRAN is literally the fastest programming language in existence. Maybe Python is good for prototyping or pre/post-processing some data, but with a performance hit in the 100x order of magnitude, you won't run Python scripts for the bulk of any serious scientific computing project.

View on HN

I think numpy and scipy[1] beg to differ. You should go look at what's actually available in terms of scientific computing on Python, as I think you might actually learn something (hint: numpy is really a bunch of Python wrappers over FORTRAN routines, if you look at the source code). Having been a PhD student in Physics, in particular (at an Ivy League university, nonetheless), I can tell you that the majority of new code we were writing was Python, and since I've left, it's probably gotten more so. A good example of Python in physics, is PyMCA[2]. Python is really poised to also (thank god) reduce the marketshare of Matlab.

[1] http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-dev/f2py/getting-started.htm... [2] http://pymca.sourceforge.net/

Also: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Python-dominate-scientific-comp... http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/138643/why-is...

Finally as a Physics person, you might also like the coursework for this (I certainly enjoyed the course): http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~myers/teaching/Computation...

another thing to consider is f2py, which allows calls to Fortran subroutines from Python. in my experience, it was faster than numpy, but you have to suffer from writing Fortran.

Just use numba and get fortran like performance by writing in python.

I got inconsistent results when using Numba. when it worked well, it was way faster than Numpy, but sometimes it was slower. I wasn't able to figure out how to do AOT compilation, so I just went with f2py. if Numba has AOT compilation, I'd definitely use that over f2py though.

AOT compilation is in the works. Also you might have been using features that numba didn't support yet. They just added more numpy ops, array allocation and vector ops, so your code might be working now.

I am no longer working on the project (it was part of a 4-month research project), but I'll make sure to tell my supervisor. thanks! :D

Most scientific computing is not "serious". My past couple papers, for example, have been mostly Python analysis of geospatial data. I use Python because it's easy to integrate with Postgres/PostGIS, and the numerical code provided by Numpy is fast enough. (I drop down into Cython when needed.) The algorithms I need to run aren't hugely intensive -- at most, something might take an hour to run, and most of my simulations take just a minute or two.

I don't need raw speed. I need development speed so I can easily iron out bugs and try new methods. My colleagues develop in R for the same reason.

I think it depends what you count as scientific computing. I'm an engineer at an industrial plant and like you for offline non intensive stuff when I have to knock up a prototype fast I use SAS mostly because it has good integration with databases and I can crank out code very fast using it.

My housemate is a Math/Stats person he works in finance and uses R for much the same reasons.

Maybe Python is useful but it would have to offer me something compelling to make me switch over.

> "Most scientific computing is not "serious""

Stopped reading after this.

Maybe not pure Python, but one of the best features of CPython is easy interoperability with C or Fortran. Python is the glue for hard-to-use but blazing fast numerical libraries. You can also write very fast code in Cython, which has basically the same syntax as Python.

Python is used in a vast amount of scientific codes. I do a very significant chunk of my work in Python. And heck, I reach to C++ to do the pre/post processing, believe it or not, the inverse of what you suspected.

Yes, python is not the future...but no, Julia and Python's Numba is just as fast as FORTRAN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com