python

Jamie and I had lunch last week with Greg Wilson, who has done yeoman's work getting students to use software productivity in research. Along those lines, I thought I might be able to offer up a some advice on how to make your life easier as a student in a scientific field.

Okay, bad attempt at a literary allusion.

But it's a question that we've been talking about around here, and to a lesser extent with some of the folks we know: where are the scientific programmers?

Jamie and I had the pleasure of going out for dim sum with Greg Wilson the other day. You might remember Greg from such classics as Science 2.0 and Stack Overflow Dev Days Toronto. He was talking to us about his Software Carpentry course that he's been running out of the University of Toronto and University of Alberta.

As Jamie said, we're doing some Python development in Eclipse, so I cooked up a quick Vibrant Ink-ish color scheme for PyDev. Here is the PyDev preference file for Eclipse.

I've been developing software for the past 10 years using Microsoft tools (VB, C++ with MFC and C#).  Up until now it's done the job, but now that we're developing our own products I've come to realize that it is time for a change.