Background: I've done a touch of IDL astronomy programming with Marc Buie. I haven't touched IDL or astronomy for about a year, though I am still in contact wi

Background: I've done a touch of IDL astronomy programming with Marc Buie. I haven't touched IDL or astronomy for about a year, though I am still in contact with a couple astronomers. In my (anecdotal) experience, it seems that a number of astronomers would actually love to move to Python but I've only seen one actually make an effort to make the move. The primary reason cited has been that some particular library modules they use haven't been ported yet. Glancing around the links from the article, it definitely seems that the porting has come a long way, but that's not the same thing as completeness. Now, obviously the best solution would be if these astronomers each took it upon themselves to translate their own necessary tools and contribute back to the Python community, but that's pretty unrealistic, I think. I write Python for at least a good 8-10 hours/day and my IDL was clean, tight, and well-documented and I'm still terrified of the thought of translating my project. Of course, the other question I have (and would _love_ an answer to) is how well Python holds up performance-wise to well-crafted IDL astronomy code. We were working with a data set large enough that, even on a cluster, each step of the process took between several days and a couple weeks. If Python could improve that, it would have been amazing, but if it would only hurt then Python would basically be useless for that project.