Simon Willison’s Weblog

Array programming with NumPy—the NumPy paper (via) The NumPy paper is out, published in Nature. I found this enlightening: for an academic paper it’s very understandable, and it filled in quite a few gaps in my mental model of what NumPy is and which problems it addresses, as well as its relationship to the many other tools in the scientific Python stack.

# 17th September 2020, 4:34 pm / python, scipy, numpy

Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser (via) More fun with WebAssembly: Pyodide attempts (and mostly succeeds) to bring the full Python data stack to the browser: CPython, NumPy, Pandas, Scipy, and Matplotlib. Also includes interesting bridge tools for e.g. driving a canvas element from Python. Really interesting project from the Firefox Data Platform team.

# 17th April 2019, 4:23 am / mozilla, pandas, python, scipy, webassembly, numpy, pyodide

Super Fast String Matching in Python (via) Interesting technique for calculating string similarity at scale in Python, with much better performance than Levenshtein distances. The trick here uses TF/IDF against N-Grams, plus a CSR (Compressed Sparse Row) scipy matrix to run the calculations. Includes clear explanations of each of these concepts.

# 5th November 2017, 3:26 pm / python, scipy

Python in the Scientific World. Python continues to make strides in the scientific world—and the Hubble Space Telescope team have been using it for 10 years!

# 6th November 2009, 11:04 am / astronomy, guido-van-rossum, hubblespacetelescope, python, science, scipy