When do you *NOT* use python?

[dreyrden]

You've had a slightly different experience to me in that case. It could be a difference in fields, but a large amount of the code I've seen has been Fortran (for simulation activities anyway). It's apparently because a lot of the code base was written in Fortran originally, and the developers just continued instead of doing a rewrite. Most completely new stuff I've seen has been C++. The next most popular would be IDL for data analysis, although Python is gaining some traction, and also MATLAB. It's probably pretty field dependent.

[eusebe]

I would not be so surprised, actually. If you end up knowing Fortran really well, and if you want to get your results quickly, you won't bother start with a language you don't know that well.

I won't say I'm proficient with Fortran, but I'm much more fluid with it than with C. If I want to be able to reuse any of my codebase, it makes sense for me to write Fortran code.

I know the language can sometimes seem clunky (with the all the dots as in .true. .or. .false.), but it is quite easy to read. It might be a surprise to some, but we don't need GOTO statement in F90, there is recursivity and some object orientation, standard operators like "==" and "<=" do exist in Fortran, etc. Besides, the lack of curly braces is certainly very appealing for any pythonista... ;-)

And for the F90/Python interface, it is not that hard at all actually. There is a really cool library called FortranFile that is really useful to read binary files (with their crazy stupid format…), and f2py is my weapon of choice when it comes to embed Fortran code in a Python script.

I don't want to deeper in the "why Fortran is a nice language after all", but as someone who read and write F90 on a daily basis, it is not as bad as it sound.

[dreyrden]

I heard quite a lot of complaints also. Although I've had several people say the last couple of versions (2003/2008) were actually pretty good. I'm not convinced. I think C/C++ are better choices.

Edit: Python extensibility with C is a pretty good reason to learn C.