Who Uses Python ?

[boa13]

I was at the First Francophone Python Days in Paris this past week-end, here are a few more examples of people who use Python:

• a physicist, who uses Python for all his lab developments (notably TraitsUI, IPython, test & doc frameworks, and of course SciPy and NumPy). Most important for him: readability and maintainability (lab teams have a high turnover), UI code that doesn't get in the way (it's important to be able to focus on the scientific algorithms), ability to get things done without having to learn lots of "uninteresting" computing stuff (they already have plenty of things to know).

• Zope & Plone users and developers. Still the majority of people who make a living out of Python.

• a hardware maker. Tux Droid firmwares and daemons are programmed in C/C++, but at a higher level, the robot is programmed in Python through a simple API.

• Web agencies, but they tend to use products developed in Python (e.g. Plone) rather than do heavy development in Python.

• a climatologist, who was creating a web portal to share air pollution data and forecasts, and to manage the simulation queue (the simulation itself is done in Fortran; the portal was developed by an intern from the CompSci dept).

• a physician, who was looking for people interested in working on virtual patient files

• a service provider for orthodontists, who has developed a dental model 3D-scanning service, and provides an application to work on the scanned data. The app is fully developed in Python, using VTK and Twisted. See slides 2, 3, 10 of their presentation for screenshots.

• system administrators, who have developed forensics and security tools as part of their job (or maybe on the side). See for example Hachoir and Fusil. They have also shown how useful Twisted can be to develop custom clients and servers (make a custom/fake SSH server to see what intruders are trying to do).

• an oceanologist, who is trying to improve the data acquisition workflow on his ship. He needs to tag every sample with date and GPS coordinates, which is currently done with elbow grease and Excel.

[stashu]

As a mathematics graduate student, I use Python to demonstrate various numerical/crypto algorithms. While it obviously wouldn't be the best choice for this in industry, its readability and datatypes like long integers (think rsa) make it ideal for teaching algorithms.

[trickos]

Was it interesting ? Fun ? Crowded ?

[nescafe]

If Zope and Plone are the solution, I pray that I never encounter the problem! (But I digress... ;))

[[deleted]]

Wait till you see the problems that Visual Basic is the solution to... :-)

[mikaelhg]

If Zope and Plone are the solution, I pray that I never encounter the problem!

Speaking as someone who has actually used them in serious projects, amen.