Python really does hit a sweet-spot for many types of operations. Devops capacity in system scripting, crawling and scraping with excellent web frameworks (Django through to Bottle). On top of all that there are great machine learning libraries as well as good APIs to almost anything not written in Python. My site gets huge amounts of NLP, machine learning and information extraction done in just a few lines because of libraries available in python that aren't in the languages that it's usually compared to.
I've also pretty much replaced bash with the ipython shell at this point, as you can use all of the bash commands anyway and even seamlessly mix them with python, file_list = !ls, it's a excellent environment for data analysis and manipulation.
I have 'ipython --profile pysh' in my terminal's custom command, on servers I'm a bit more cautious and have a 'pu' (power up, or python up) command which is basically the first thing I type. You have to watch out for the shell history not working quite the same and that newly installed programs won't be seen until you do a '%rehashx'. Other than that it's pretty much all gravy. Now I just need to get around to transitioning to that python tiling window manager.
While I've got you, and seeing you are not longer at Reddit, what do you think of jkl.io (launched today)?
I think someone asked the question at a Scipy conference a few years back, "Who here uses IPython as their primary shell", and IIRC about 30% of the people raised their hands.
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Python really does hit a sweet-spot for many types of operations. Devops capacity in system scripting, crawling and scraping with excellent web frameworks (Django through to Bottle). On top of all that there are great machine learning libraries as well as good APIs to almost anything not written in Python. My site gets huge amounts of NLP, machine learning and information extraction done in just a few lines because of libraries available in python that aren't in the languages that it's usually compared to.
I've also pretty much replaced bash with the ipython shell at this point, as you can use all of the bash commands anyway and even seamlessly mix them with python, file_list = !ls, it's a excellent environment for data analysis and manipulation.
You know, it never occurred to me to use iPython as my shell. I think that would make me more productive. I'll have to try that, thanks!
I have 'ipython --profile pysh' in my terminal's custom command, on servers I'm a bit more cautious and have a 'pu' (power up, or python up) command which is basically the first thing I type. You have to watch out for the shell history not working quite the same and that newly installed programs won't be seen until you do a '%rehashx'. Other than that it's pretty much all gravy. Now I just need to get around to transitioning to that python tiling window manager.
While I've got you, and seeing you are not longer at Reddit, what do you think of jkl.io (launched today)?
I think someone asked the question at a Scipy conference a few years back, "Who here uses IPython as their primary shell", and IIRC about 30% of the people raised their hands.
Someone once said that Python is the second-best language for everything. I found that to be true.