[bip] welcome!

[Paul-Michael Agapow]

Greetings - and let me say that this mailing list is a great idea.

My biography in a nutshell: having wandered through phylogenetics,  
macroevolutionary inference, biodiversity, and molecular evolution  
using Python as my chosen tool (as I've said to others "Python is the  
best tool for 80% of what i do, and good enough for the remaining  
20%"), I've now eking out a living doing epi-informatics, bathing in  
a rich stew of disease data, visualising them on the web via Plone/ 
Zope. I've taught many biologists how to program in Python. Some  
notes to an extended class I taught in South Africa can be found here::

	<http://www.agapow.net/teaching/advanced-python-nbn-2006/>

which I'm slowly turning into a book. Some odd notes about Python and  
some surprises can be found here::

	<http://www.agapow.net/programming/python/>

To provoke some discussion, my quick list of good and bad things  
about Python (that aren't necessarily unique to Python). Good things:

	* Readability
	* A conservative, compact, natural language design
	* Being able to play around and test code at the prompt, especially  
using ipython
	* Many large and sophisticated libraries and third-party modules
	* Restructured text and docutils!

Bad things:

	* Poor - or non-existent - documentation for some complex third- 
party modules
	* Over engineered or over complex frameworks, what I describe as  
"libraries that assume you have nothing else to do with your time  
other than leanr how to use them" (*cough* Plone *cough*)
	* As yet under-developed or fiddly GUI layers
	* "You can get a working version from the svn repository ..."

p-m


--
Dr Paul-Michael Agapow: VieDigitale / Inst. for Animal Health
pma at viedigitale.com / paul-michael.agapow at bbsrc.ac.uk



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