Rudra Banerjee, 24.11.2011 12:31:
I am a newbie in python and basically i use python for postprocessing like plotting, data manipulation etc. Based on ease of programming on python I am wondering if I can consider it for the main development as well. My jobs (written on fortran) runs for weeks and quite CPU intensive. How python works on these type of heavy computation?
You already got a lot of answers that pointed you to the scientific computing tools that are available for Python. The reason why they exist is because (and nowadays also "why") Python is so extremely popular in that field: it's an easy to learn and use language and the standard implementation (often referred to as CPython) makes it really easy to interface with external code (C/C++/Fortran/etc.) in a very efficient way.
In addition to looking at NumPy/SciPy and/or Sage (depending on the kind of computations you are involved with), you should also look at fwrap and Cython. They will allow you to easily wrap your existing Fortran code for Python, and to quickly write very fast glue code for the two language environments. Thus, you can keep your existing code as it is, and use and control it from Python, using all the nice tools that Python provides for quickly writing anything from distributed code and test suites to graphical user interfaces for visualising your data. Since you specifically asked about plotting, don't miss out on matplotlib.
Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
