Keynote: Begin...End?

This is the talk: link to this video , it is a full hour. Quite enjoyable but light on in depth technical stuff. Don't recall hem mentioning how git python running technically, it is more about how he came in the position to do so in the first place.

I recommend one of the recent videos by Dave Beazly 1. He lived through and contributed to the raise of Python in scientific computing first hand in the 90s, and offers some interesting insights. Plus he's always quite an entertainer. 1 link to this video

According to David Beazley, it was lucky to already being around by the time scientific computing folks were in need for dynamic languages as wrappers to help with increasingly complex hardware and projects written in lower level languages, and the only other viable alternatives back then were Perl and tcl. Watch this talk: link to this video Then it just snowballed since that time.

…ting modules that allowed the Python interpreter to interoperate with scientific code was one of the foundations for it to snowball many years later. So I wonder if what this paper describes had shipped in time, if that would lead us by butterfly effect into the alternative timeline where Lisp dominates scientific computing, instead of Python. See link to this video…

Begin...End?

I started using Python full time in 1998 for cheminformatics. One of the first projects I did was to make a high-level/"Pythonic" interface to an existing C library. I described it in Dr. Dobb's Journal, at link . Going back in time to 1994, we had a molecular dynamics visualization tool called VMD. It had a home-grown scripting language. I had ideas for a new programming language designed for molecular modeling (because "tiny languages" was the Unix philosophy I had picked up). After looking around, I realized 1) I didn't know how to really make a new domain-specific programming language, and 2) there were existing programming languages that could be embedded in an application, and extend…