As a physicist and programmer I just love that Python was used both for controlling the actual experiment and for analyzing the data! Six years ago when I start

As a physicist and programmer I just love that Python was used both for controlling the actual experiment and for analyzing the data! Six years ago when I started my PhD I also moved all the code for my experiment from proprietary software (Matlab/Mathematica/Labview) to Python (+matplotlob, pyvisa, PyQt/PySide). Many of my colleagues and supervisors were rather skeptical about this back then as Python was still considered quite new and the tooling was not as good as it is today. It seems though that Python is finally becoming the de facto standard for experiment control and data analysis, especially for more complex use cases that require a good software architecture (which is hard to implement e.g. with Labview). This is really great news for me as it makes sharing code and data much easier (if they had done their analysis in Matlab it would be hard to reproduce for people that don't have access to that software, but with the iPython notebook everything you need to reproduce the results is open-source). Great stuff, let's keep pushing Python forward :)