3.5. The Python scientific software stack

Why has Python become such a widely used programming language, particularly for scientific software? There are two simple but telling answers: (i) it is an incredibly elegant language with minimal formatting overhead that is straight-forward to learn even for people that never programmed before, and (ii) there exists a well-established stack of high-quality libraries for many aspects of scientific software, namely NumPy, SciPy and Matplotlib, to name the most important general-purpose tools. Another quite important aspect that cannot be overestimated is the quality of the available official documentation, both for Python as a programming language and the mentioned libraries forming the Python scientific software stack.

• The tools: Python scientific software stack

  • NumPy – https://numpy.org/

  • SciPy – https://www.scipy.org/

  • Matplotlib – https://matplotlib.org/

For now, readers are referred to the Scipy Lecture Notes available online as HTML as well as (beautifully typeset) PDF versions.