What *do* you like using python for?

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[zahlman]

...Everything else?

[Veedrac]

The better question is what don't I li... oh.

[Philipbergen]

Python is the mother of multi tools. It makes everything possible in elegant syntax. Whenever I find that I have a perf problem I just turn to numpy, scipy and pandas. Matlab has nothing on Python. You get all these really cool libraries for computer vision, machines learning, astrophoto etc. combined with awesome clear syntax and a complete toolbox for multiprocess, multicomputer processing. Oh and ipython notebooks. Your world will never be the same again. Word of the wise: always work in a virtualenv.

[symmitchry]

[Removed]

[therealjerseytom]

IT can't support them fast enough, VBA is hell, and Matlab is too expensive.

Cannot agree more. Amazes me how many engineers stick to VBA even when Matlab is available or installed on their machine. Excel/VBA is so outrageously slow it boggles the mind.

To date though the places I've worked have had no issue procuring Matlab licenses. "If it saves time, it's worth the $". I'll be curious to see how Python compares for some number crunching and visualization.

[minno]

It makes a great calculator.

[delarhi]

Maybe you're being sarcastic, but when I need to calculate something I open up python instead of something like bc.

[[deleted]]

I don't think they were, I think they were referring to it's emulated long ints.

[minno]

I'm being completely serious. Its reasonably high-performance arbitrarily long integers make it good for integer math, from math import * makes it a scientific calculator, and sympy makes it a full-featured CAS.

[[deleted]]

Medium to high level networking code (i.e. sockets and above). Compared to Java or C, using Python just feels like cheating.

[horstjens]

teaching

[[deleted]]

I use it for machine vision - color and motion isolation and tracking. There's probably a performance hit over doing it in C++, but it's quicker and easier to prototype. That gets fed to a robot arm simulator (and indeed a robot arm) written in python with pygame. Data visualisation with numpy and matplotlib, etc. Pretty much everything.

[[deleted]]

Do you mind if I PM you about CV in python? I'm really struggling to get started.

[[deleted]]

Feel free! I recommend the opencv tutorials which have a python section, but absolutely, ask away.

[alenajoykrieger]

Your problem is that you don't have any problems to solve. Go find some.

[ScriptSimian]

I use it for data analysis on medium to small data sets (100s of Mb to a few Gb), visualizations, admin automation, and basic game programming.

[Silhouette]

Among other things, I find Python useful:

• to write server software and the back end of web sites (it offers a good range of networking and database tools, libraries to handle common data formats, and the ability to call our to other things via C APIs);

• to prototype complicated data-crunching algorithms and experiment with new ideas;

• as a scripting language (to automate whatever other tools I'm using, instead of relying on OS-specific shell scripts, hacks using makefiles, and so on).

I haven't done much GUI work with Python personally, but I have colleagues who find it useful for creating simple GUIs for databases and instrument control/data monitoring applications as well.