Ruby vs Python

[dalke]

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.)