David Beazley (University of Chicago)
Scripting languages have become a powerful tool for the construction of flexible scientific software because they provide an interpreted programming environment and can be easily integrated with existing software written in C, C++, and Fortran. In this talk, I will introduce the Python programming language and discuss why Python, and scripting languages in general, are a sensible next step for many scientific applications. I will then describe the use of Python with a large-scale molecular dynamics code developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory and how the use of Python revolutionized the use of this application. Finally, I will briefly describe some of the projects aimed at improving Python's support for scientific programming.