{"id":7442,"date":"2011-09-08T08:31:18","date_gmt":"2011-09-08T15:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=7442"},"modified":"2011-09-08T08:31:18","modified_gmt":"2011-09-08T15:31:18","slug":"python","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/08\/python\/","title":{"rendered":"Python"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve decided I need to become a programmer again.  As an undergrad, and to a lesser extent as a grad student, I wrote code all the time.  But since I started doing research, it&#8217;s been pencil-and-paper almost all the way through, with occasional dips into Mathematica or plotting programs.<\/p>\n<p>That must end, so I&#8217;ve decided to learn Python.  I just need something simple for number-crunching and graphics, and everyone in the know seems to have nice things to say about the language.  (Secretly I would like to play around with genetic algorithms and cellular automata, but I&#8217;m not going to admit that.)  I tried to get Fortran, my previous language of choice, up and running on my Mac &#8230; it didn&#8217;t go well.<\/p>\n<p>So&#8230; any tips?  Pointers to well-written resources and tutorials (online or in print) would be especially helpful.  Keep in mind that the target audience is an aging theoretical physicist who hasn&#8217;t programmed in 20 years, and for that matter has been pretty much command-prompt free (working on my Mac) for the last five.<\/p>\n<p>The things I admit in public on this blog, sheesh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve decided I need to become a programmer again. As an undergrad, and to a lesser extent as a grad student, I wrote code all the time. But since I started doing research, it&#8217;s been pencil-and-paper almost all the way through, with occasional dips into Mathematica or plotting programs. That must end, so I&#8217;ve decided [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}