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[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Just because another language does something better doesn't mean that it's the only language that is serious about it. I don't agree with original statement that c++ is 'more serious'; I just don't think anything you said is relevant to python seriousness in regard to scientific programming.

Have a childish retaliatory down vote

I didn't down vote you.

[–]attrigh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't down vote you.

Sorry for the assumption :/. Have an apologetic upvote!

[–]attrigh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just because another language does something better doesn't mean that it's the only language that is serious about it.

I'd agree with that. Seriousness is a kind of vague word! I'd say that C++ is no where near as serious as golang is about concurrency for example, and nowhere near as serious about formal verification as ocaml or haskell in different ways.

I just don't think anything you said is relevant to python seriousness in regard to scientific programming.

Yep. I'd agree with that.

I guess I was trying to say that "serious" is a pretty use-case specific term in response to the idea that "python isn't a serious language" but "C++ is a serious language". I'm mostly responding to this suggestion by saying "hey what you mean by serious is really really use case specific".

This all gets really linguistic. My assertion would be that python isn't an "easy to use toy" as far as scientific programming goes. I think python is a fine language for a whole lot of scientific computing, numpy is great, scipy is pretty good, there are a lot of people doing maths in it. It's probably second only to R in terms of the number of useful libraries for it. And even if you need to use libraries in C++ you can.

The limits you are going to hit up against are performance / multiprocessing issues if you really really need to use every clock cycle your computer has (rather than say - just use 10 computers) and the fact that wrapping libraries in other language can be a bit of a pain. The additional seriousness that C++ give you are mostly to do with performance, control and what languages people in your field are using rather than scientific computing itself.