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If anything, Python in science is the opposite of cargo cult - it's more like pragmatic to a fault. Its ubiquituous in academia/science, has a low barrier to e

If anything, Python in science is the opposite of cargo cult - it's more like pragmatic to a fault. Its ubiquituous in academia/science, has a low barrier to entry, and a large amount and arguably often unmatched quality of specialized libraries/frameworks/tools for all kinds of scientific fields. So the first go to language/ecosystem will of course almost always be python. I'm definitely not the biggest fan of Python (the language). And there certainly are more elegant/fitting languages for many problem classes. But the thing is, from my experience many people in the field are quite aware of this. But it simply doesn't matter if it's the best language from a developer POV. It just has to be good enough to get the job done, apart from this the points above are simply more imporant. And it's hard to understate the importance of ubiquity in this case: Python is the code equivalent of a lingua franca in science.

mnemonicsloth 6y ago
I think you're leaving out the most salient fact. Scientists are smart within their fields, but they're usually terrible at programming. I once saw a hundred-page source file (one file for everything) that defined no functions. And of course it was in python. So if you're arguing that python is good if you want to exchange source code with people... I guess you might do that? Personally, nobody has asked me for my code in quite a while, so I do all my work in Calysto scheme (which is written in python and can accesss the whole library ecosystem). If, on the other hand, you're saying scientists' opinions on what constitutes a good programming language ought to be taken seriously, then you're wrong. Scientists are crappy programmers for the same reason they're crappy writers. Programming and writing are tools they use to get their real work done. Most of them master the minimum they need and spend most of their time in the lab
michaelcampbell 6y ago
"large numbers of libraries" is almost a subgenre of cargo cult. You're not programming, you're using code you assume does a thing because either it says so or you saw someone else do; but not doing it yourself. Python is paying my mortgage right now and I enjoy using it, but the community around it is no more enlightened with respect to cargo culting than any other I've seen.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Yes. So many developers think, I string together some APIs into something that looks like an app, I've done something. Forgetting those libraries are designed/tested to work only on whatever subset of the problem space they were used for previously. They probably don't handle your case; they don't have explicit capacity promises; they don't work together (don't respect each others backpressure signals, don't understand each others error spaces etc). I read open source, then extract the bits of IP I think was useful. Often rewriting it to fit my case. Its useful source, but as an example to help me write my app. { Please don't use Linux as a strawman (You rewrote Linux?! I don't believe it!) That's the single largest, most successful (along with maybe 5 others) open source project. But absolutely not representative of the 1M other projects out there. }

mnemonicsloth 6y ago

I think you're leaving out the most salient fact. Scientists are smart within their fields, but they're usually terrible at programming. I once saw a hundred-page source file (one file for everything) that defined no functions. And of course it was in python. So if you're arguing that python is good if you want to exchange source code with people... I guess you might do that? Personally, nobody has asked me for my code in quite a while, so I do all my work in Calysto scheme (which is written in python and can accesss the whole library ecosystem). If, on the other hand, you're saying scientists' opinions on what constitutes a good programming language ought to be taken seriously, then you're wrong. Scientists are crappy programmers for the same reason they're crappy writers. Programming and writing are tools they use to get their real work done. Most of them master the minimum they need and spend most of their time in the lab

michaelcampbell 6y ago

"large numbers of libraries" is almost a subgenre of cargo cult. You're not programming, you're using code you assume does a thing because either it says so or you saw someone else do; but not doing it yourself. Python is paying my mortgage right now and I enjoy using it, but the community around it is no more enlightened with respect to cargo culting than any other I've seen.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Yes. So many developers think, I string together some APIs into something that looks like an app, I've done something. Forgetting those libraries are designed/tested to work only on whatever subset of the problem space they were used for previously. They probably don't handle your case; they don't have explicit capacity promises; they don't work together (don't respect each others backpressure signals, don't understand each others error spaces etc). I read open source, then extract the bits of IP I think was useful. Often rewriting it to fit my case. Its useful source, but as an example to help me write my app. { Please don't use Linux as a strawman (You rewrote Linux?! I don't believe it!) That's the single largest, most successful (along with maybe 5 others) open source project. But absolutely not representative of the 1M other projects out there. }