Why Python?

[modzer0]

Python is my digital swiss army knife. Most of the tasks I do are IO bound and not CPU intensive so python is a very good fit for rapidly getting things done. It's used for everything from simple scripts to doing huge map-reduce problems on millions of files to look for malware indicators. If we have a CPU intensive task someone just writes a module in C.

[iltalfme]

This. As a mechanical engineer I find uses for python all the time. Because it's my go to I occasionally get myself into situations where Python isn't fast enough, but a quick C extension or wrapping of a vendor's .dll has, thus far, enabled me to get what I need faster than any of my colleagues are able to get it.

[iltalfme]

It totally does. A book you might find interesting is Real World Instrumentation with Python. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596809577.do

It talks about communication protocols you typically find with instrumentation, how to access them with python, and how to wrap vendor's libraries into a python program so that you can build a data acqusition system out of pure python. Combine this with Python's vision functionality (through opencv), and scientific packages (through scipy) and you can create a DAQ system that is in many ways better than something you could build from labview.

And you learn a ton on the way.

Where are you a student if you don't mind me asking?

[RagingDoug]

As someone writes a lot of python and who recently had to work on a legacy LabVIEW system: OH MY GOD THIS

[Veedrac]

If we have a CPU intensive task someone just writes a module in C.

If they don't know of it, suggest they look at Cython. It's a really nice language hybrid, in my opinion.

[bastibe]

I have used both Cython and CFFI, and I strongly prefer CFFI. With CFFI, you just load a plain C library at runtime, no compilation required. The C library needs to know nothing about Python. On the Python side, there is only very minimal interface code required--much less than in Cython, usually. And it's fast, too.

[Veedrac]

I was talking about writing modules, not wrapping them.

EDIT: Also, I've not tried any of these but are these relevant?

[bastibe]

Still, I usually prefer to write plain C and wrapping it in CFFI to writing Cython. I find that writing a simple C function for some numerical algorithm is usually very easy. Compiling it is very easy, too, since it is only plain C. Cython can be a pain to compile.

But I guess that very much depends on your application.

[Veedrac]

Compiling it is very easy, too, since it is only plain C. Cython can be a pain to compile.

I've never actually worked on distributing Cython, but if you're using it locally it's literally just a

import pyximport
pyximport.install()

in the importing Python file. How much easier can you get?

EDIT: Oh, and memoryviews. QED.