This blog is primarily a personal reference and record. If it is useful to you also, then that’s great. If you have advice for better programming practices, let me know.

I am a graduate student with an interest in computational sciences. In the summer of 2011, I decided to learn modeling and computational fluid dynamics as well as a new language to program in; Python. This site will host my notes on Python and modeling.

–Programming–
Earliest programming experience was on the Commodore 64. I remember clearly getting frustrated with trying to move a sprite I made of an X-wing fighter around the screen with a joystick. Maybe if I was successful I would have went on to program lots of games instead of taking a long hiatus from programming.

I’ve done Java programming off and on since 2000 but it was mostly just for fun.

I started graduate school in fall 2010 and was intensely learning IDL and writing programs in the lab. But I soon decided I needed to learn another popular and open source language because I don’t know when I’ll be able to use IDL again once I leave the lab. Trying Fortran made my stomach turn and then I tried Python. The syntax looked so much nicer and after finding out about NumPy, it made it so easy to jump right in.

The things I don’t like about IDL are the required $ and & line delimiters, and two-letter comparisons instead of symbols ( ‘eq’ instead of ‘==’, ‘lt’ instead of ‘<‘). These things were often the reason for bugs in my scripts. Python uses ‘**’ instead of ‘^’ for powers but I got use to that.

I am using the Python(x,y) package which includes the Spyder IDLE.