
The homogenization of scientific computing (2013) - ehudla
http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2013/11/18/the-homogenization-of-scientific-computing-or-why-python-is-steadily-eating-other-languages-lunch/
======
saboot
The astronomy department I worked at briefly during my undergrad underwent a
similar process. The ten or so grad students separately used Matlab,
Mathematica, C, IDL, and a couple of the newer members used Python. They spent
some time on the side working on the AstroPy package and all started
transitioning to Python as their needed functions and data processing
pipelines were implemented.

I'm in nuclear engineering now, I'm seeing a similar process. It used to be
Matlab for everything but once the Anaconda Python distro came out and made
installing python and the science libraries a simple process many undergrads
are now using Python instead. The Spyder editor with the documentation window
makes it really easy for undergrads to lookup functions, similar to the Matlab
editor.

~~~
Iwan-Zotow
!

My SO is teaching physics in small university. Used to use Excel, Matlab, some
other statistics packages. Now it is Anaconda all the way down.

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zmmmmm
I wonder why nothing as good as RStudio seems to be available for Python yet?
I feel like Python is stuck in Jupyter rutt - a local minima (or maxima,
depending on your perspective) where Jupyter is capturing all the interest but
is fundamentally not as good for data exploration (just my opinion, from using
both intensively over years). I often _want_ to use Python but I keep going
back to RStudio because I find Jupyter painful (even after enhancing with
BeakerX [1] which I love for what it is, but it can't fix the underlying
constraints of Jupyter ...).

[1] [http://beakerx.com/](http://beakerx.com/)

~~~
ehudla
RStudio? Really? What do you like about it? I see various advantages R has,
but RStudio never appealed.

As for Jupyter (which I love), there's nteract [1], which Netflix seems to be
supporting [2].

[1] [https://github.com/nteract/nteract](https://github.com/nteract/nteract)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17795026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17795026)

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glup
No mention of Jupyter notebooks — I think that's a critical part of this
change, in that it provides a sharable human-readable analysis format.

Also for the original poster (whose psycholinguistics work I am familiar
with), it's easy to move data between R and Python using the rpy packages
(which works in notebooks!)

~~~
posterboy
Does scientific computing happen in notebooks? I'd think they mean
Supercomputers, not experiments running in the browser.

~~~
glup
Yes, definitely. Only the GUI for Jupiter is in the browser — the computation
is on a workstation, server, or an iPython parallel cluster, so you can use
proper HPC resources. Another common pattern (because socket-based
communication can die) is to run the heavy HPC stuff with SLURM, etc. then
compile and analyze the results in the notebook.

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merqurio
I remember the great joy it was rewrtot some MATLAB and Bash scripts for
neuroimaging to Python, and how fast it let us iterate. Thanks to that
rewriting we ended up having a proper pipeline that we were able to
parallelize.

Since then Python is my go-to language, but that didn't stopped me from
exploring other languages like Julia, for large numerical analysis or Go.

I see that Pythonification he talks about around me, and it's true that is
becoming ubiquitous and the defacto langugae on sciences, specially on life
sciences.

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dang
Discussed in 2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7729006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7729006)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030097)

2013:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6756430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6756430)

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transfire
I suspect Julia will eventually rise to the occasion.

~~~
natalyarostova
I haven't used it, but can Julia replace Python as a production language for
dual use by software devs and data scientists?

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kgwgk
This really needs a [2013] in the title.

~~~
dang
Added - thanks.

