python

Just a list of data clustering packages in Python

I've started tinkering with Emacs again!  Some cool add-ons which have gotten me excited about Emacs again:

Python libraries

• Theano - “Theano is a Python library that allows you to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficiently.”
• Pandas - “an open source, BSD-licensed library providing high-performance, easy-to-use data structures and data analysis tools for the Python programming language… Time series-functionality: date range generation and frequency conversion, moving window statistics, moving window linear

Over the course of my PhD, I intend to write a smart meter disaggregation system.  Maybe this system will end up as a web service; maybe not.  At the very least, it will need to play nicely with existing web services like Pachube.  I've been wondering which language(s) I should use to build my system.  My current answer to this question is to write a complete prototype of the "backend" in Python, with the front-end written in JavaScript, HTML5 and SVG.  It's likely that parts of the "backend" will run rather slowly in Python; but luckily it's easy to get Python to play well with C++ code, so I'd plan to re-write computationally intensive sections in C++.

My initial plan was to use Matlab.  But after writing several thousand lines of Matlab, I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable with it.  There are some seriously ugly bits of the language; and in general it has a rather "hacked together" feel to it.  It turns out I'm not the only one who feels uncomfortable with Matlab: there's a blog called "Abandon MATLAB" with gems like "[Mathworks] even updated the docs for “getframe” to clarify that you need to turn off the fucking screen saver and walk away from the computer like it’s 1992.".  One especially interesting post in "Abandon MATLAB" links to the results of a survey which compares attitudes to MATLAB to attitudes to Python.  Basically, I feel content that I wasn't completely crazy to abandon Matlab in favor of Python and C++.  I'll admit that I'm struggling a bit to wrap my head around JavaScript but I'm getting there with the help of Douglas Crockford's excellent book "JavaScript: The Good Parts".