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One of the authors of the STL (C++'s Standard Template Library) explains generic programming and slams Java.

"I'd rather not even *think* about developing a web application/webservice/web-whatever in standard C++... is it actually possible?? Perhaps with some weird Microsoft solutions... I bet your bank online services are written in Java. Certainly not in PHP+MySQL :)" Doing in C++ would be awesomely crazy, I agree :) But as I see it there are lots of huge websites that operate on PHP, see for instance Facebook. For the banks and the enterprise market, as a general rule I tend to take with a grain of salt whatever spin comes out from them; in the end behind every corporate IT decision there is a little smurf just trying to survive and have the back covered :) As they used to say in the old times, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". "Industry has chosen Java not because of industrial-corporate marketing bullshit, but because of economics... it enables you develop robustly, reliably, error-prone, modular, well integrated etc... software. And the costs? Well, using java technologies you can set-up enterprise-quality web application servers, get a fully featured development environment (which is better than ANY C/C++/whatever development environment I've EVER seen) at the cost of exactly 0 (zero!) USD/GBP/EUR... Since many years now, the central issue in software development is not implementing algorithms, it's building applications. And that's where Java outperforms many other technologies." Apart from the IDE considerations (on which I cannot comment, since I'm not a IDE user myself), I do not see how Java beats the competition in this regard (again, Python and the huge software ecosystem surrounding it). My impression is that Java's success is mostly due to Sun pushing it like there is no tomorrow and bundling it with their hardware business.

OK, I think there is a bit of everything, wrong and right, but you have to acknowledge that Python is not always the simplest. For info, Facebook uses Java (if you upload picture for instance), and PHP is very limited. So definitely, in company, engineers like you and me select the language, it is not a marketing or political thing. And in the case of fb, they come up with the conclusion that PHP, and Java don't do everything but complement each other. As you say Python as many things around, but it might be too much for simple applications. Otherwise, I would seriously be interested by a study of how to implement a Python-like system on-board spacecrafts and what are the advantages over mixing C, Ada and Java.

In the past 12 months Americans have searched for Python on Google more often than for Kim Kardashian, a reality-TV star. The number of queries has trebled since 2010, while those for other major programming languages have been flat or declining.

Likely this is correlated with the increased interest in machine learning in the past decade - all the popular DL libraries are Python-based after all...

Long life Python!!! Check the Alec Thomas comment.

Nice explanation of Python's internals.

Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company ...

Having Google backing it will certainly help, even though they are presenting it as a "system level" (i.e., hard-core) language, and in that domain it is much more difficult to bullshit your way to a position of relevance. Look at Java: Sun pushed it like hell and it is certainly widely used in many contexts (corporate, web and embedded markets mostly), yet it completely failed to win the hearts of "open-source" developers (or, more generally, of those developers who are not forced to use it by virtue of some management-driven decision).

"or, more generally, of those developers who are not forced to use it by virtue of some management-driven decision" completely agree with that!!

Need to tap into a python session? Look no further!

Intuitive, well documented, and very powerful. A library to keep an eye on. Check the example Belgian elections, June 13, 2010 - Twitter opinion mining

Interesting blog maintained by the people from D-Wave, who developed the first commercial quantum computer. The blog presents a python implementation to program the D-Wave and some examples.

new programming language - hybrid between c and python .... from google .... of any interest for us?

See the other post for my comments....

sorry - did not see Juxi's entry ....

Best explanation of the GIL so far

Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization framework developed by NASA since 2010

A sonification experiment taking data from ATLAS and translating it into music. The outcome was played at Montreux jazz fest, listen to the results in soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/sonification-quantizer. The way it works is "A tiny subset of collision data from the ATLAS Detector (in CERN, Switzerland) is being generated and streamed in real-time into a sonification engine built atop Python, Pure Data, Ableton, and IceCast." Code's in github https://github.com/cherston/Quantizer_public

The International Space Apps Challenge is now over, it is interesting to have a look at the solutions ...

what sort of "app" is this e.g. http://spaceappschallenge.org/challenge/brightest-night/solution/132 "We started of by trying to set our camera in raw mode, howsoever this can't be done for current logitech modules and without a high risk of permanently destroying the camera (reflashing the EEPROM). we use a logitech c920 and captured a raw image from it using guvcview on ArchLinux we then wrote some python code to calculate the average BGR value of our Image. We are currently workin on automiztion, but this will take much longer as there will be a lot of reverse engineering of the USB-Protocol needed."

c'mon really! To name a few: - Tour of the Solar System ... that is one of the numerous specialities of the ACT. - Satellite data correlation tool ... solution is flawed, but I really like the idea. Lot of added value. I definitely think are interestung stuffs to do there for cheap. - Aurora project: Model & Data ... space weather not interesting?! - Kepler ... a classic Do not expect the solutions to be tremendous just after 3 days of work, but the proposed list of challenges are "seeds" for innovation to me.

It is a very interesting projecto to easily perform quantum optics calculations.

Francesco, check this one out ... seems like coming at the right time for us ... Leopold

Sure looks interesting, hopefully it will gain some traction. Bonus point it uses Python heavily :) First versions are coming out in Sept/Oct, according to their roadmap, we could start playing with it as soon as it gets out.

For Dario: the PI computation record was established on a single desktop computer using a cache optimized algorithm. Previous record was obtained by a cluster of hundreds of computers. The cache optimized algorithm was 20 times faster.

"btw: we will very soon have the very same processor in the new iMac .... what record are you going to beat with it?" Fastest Linux install on an iMac :)

"Fastest Linux install on an iMac :)" that is going to be a though one but a worthy aim! ""The art of computer programming" is probably the closest thing to a bible for computer scientists :)" yep! Programming is art ;)

Pretty interesting piece on computer languages.

Yes, very good, but I don't get what all the fuss is about... everyone knows Python is the ultimate programming language! :) Follow up reading: If programming languages were religions... (quite accurate actually) Great quote from the article you linked to: In 1975 Edsger W. Dijkstra, a major figure in the structured-programming movement, wrote a memo titled "How Do We Tell Truths that Might Hurt?" The "truths" were mostly Dijkstra's opinions of programming languages; how he told them was very bluntly. Fortran is "an infantile disorder," PL/I "a fatal disease," APL "a mistake, carried through to perfection." Students exposed to COBOL "are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration," he said. "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."

Fool! You can pry my templates from my cold dead hands!

Browsing Kaggle...

Very nice library, we actually use it for GTOC7.

IBM for the first time ever is making quantum computing available to the public, providing access to a quantum processor via the cloud. Users can create algorithms and run experiments and get inspired by the possibilities of a quantum computer.

Looks interesting.. Have you tried it?

Mathias Troyer from ETH Zurtich gave a talk in Leiden where he showed what he wants to be the replacement to this IBM programming or the best ally of it - program quantum computers with, for instance, python code. Nice developments coming from the quantum coding field, besides the fact we are ages away from a practical quantum computer.

Cool repository with python source code for GNC applications of AI technology.