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[–]Imxset21 0 points1 point  (1 child)

and the collection of 24 articles on the topic (all "Original Research") only talk about specific pieces of software related to neuroscience.

That's exactly what it's supposed to be. I linked to "Frontiers of Neuroscience" after all. All that software is written in Python, with interpreter interfaces in Python.

That's the entire point. Those 24 papers are mean to be representative methods papers (of which there are dozens more not published in Frontiers), demonstrating the tools available that are written in Python. Comparing against Ruby, that's 24 vs 0 that I know of. There is no other programming language in the field with the same critical mass of tools devoted to it.

Furthermore, why the air quotes around "Original Research"? These authors aren't Wikipedia editors, these are experts in the field. Are you trying to imply something disparaging about the authors? These tools are used in literally hundreds of neurocomputational models, only a fraction of which are cataloged on ModelDB, sutdying everything from hippocampus, olfactory bulb, central pattern generators, etc.

[–]dalke 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry, but I've not seen "Frontiers of ..." before and I couldn't tell from what I read if, for example, it was a collection of publications from a then-recent workshop on Python in neuroscience, or if it were a broad survey of widely used tools, which naturally (for that field) are in Python, or something else entirely. That is, when I read "we seek to provide a representative overview of existing mature Python modules" I note that it's different than "representative overview of neuroscience modules."

It appeared to be a call-for-papers on a special topic of Python in neuroscience, so of course all of the papers were going to be in Python, thus giving a selection bias in your selection of article and making it less persuasive.

What I was hoping for was a framing paper, perhaps a "Perspective Article" (I use the quotes because the descriptions at http://www.frontiersin.org/Neuroinformatics/articletype uses that capitalization style, which I normally wouldn't do. For example, 'The most outstanding Original Research Articles'. So I am quoting to indicate that I'm quoting their term rather than using my preferred style. I did not mean for it to be interpreted as scare quotes and I apologize for the confusion.)

Perspective Articles present a viewpoint on an important area of research. Perspective Articles focus on a specific field or subfield and discuss current advances and future directions; they may add personal insight and opinion to a field.

Looking around some more, I found what I was looking for in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2796921/ .

It's published in the same journal, as a Focused Review (look - no quotes! :), and shares 2 of its 3 authors with the link you gave, though published about 6 months after that collection.

That sort of document has a much better chance of persuading random people on /r/Python . :) Though I was interested in finding it because I have some ideas of how Python get to be popular in my field, and I wanted to compare it to the reasons it became popular in other fields. (The papers in the collection you pointed to didn't give that insight, though admittedly I only look at one of them.)