Introduction to Python

Brief History

• Created in the late 1980's
• by Guido van Rossum - Benevolent Dictator For Life

• Python 2.0 into the Naughties
• A move to transparancy and a community driven language

• Python 3.0 was released in 2008
• Update to the 'modern way' of doing things
• Object-oriented programming

Python philosophy

• Borrow ideas from elsewhere whenever it makes sense.

"Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." (Einstein)

• Do one thing well (The "UNIX philosophy").

• Don't fret too much about performance - plan to optimize later when needed.

Python philosophy (continued)

• Don't fight the environment and go with the flow.

• Don't try for perfection because "good enough" is often just that.

• (Hence) it’s okay to cut corners sometimes, especially if you can do it right later.

• Source: http://python-history.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/pythons-design-philosophy.html

Python applications

Institutional support includes:

• UK Met Office
• British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC)
• Cefas
• National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS)
• European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
• EUMETSAT
• US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
• many-many more

Adopting Python as the main computing tool encourages better coding practices, efficient data analysis and open-access research, helping scientific community reduce the so-called reproducibility crisis.

Scientific Python stack

• NumPy provides efficient storage and computation for multi-dimensional data arrays.

• SciPy contains a wide array of numerical tools such as numerical integration and interpolation.

• Pandas provides a DataFrame object along with a powerful set of methods to manipulate, filter, group, and transform data.

• Matplotlib provides a useful interface for creation of publication-quality plots and figures.

To tap into the power of this data science ecosystem, we will spend the first day on becoming familiar with Python language itself.

References

A Whirlwind Tour of Python by Jake VanderPlas (O’Reilly). Copyright 2016 O’Reilly Media, Inc., 978-1-491-96465-1