Hi Szabolcs and thanks for the reply. Actually, I was a bit embarrassed about what happened, since I don't make it a habit of posting unrelated thoughts in other people's threads :-)
Back to the topic of this discussion, I would like to emphasize I agree about the need for a greater integration of Mathematica with Python. Thinking about it, I've decided that calling Python from Mathematica would be just as helpful as calling Mathematica from Python. Totally agree that the speed of data transfer is critical for things like computational geometry, as you mentioned, or other stuff like machine learning, and also about the fundamental importance of numpy arrays. And about how much an obstacle context switching is...although you can hack together anything, once you start dealing with multiple frameworks the focus becomes more on the programming and less on the problem at hand. And then, just the amount of libraries out there in Python that focus on scientific computing, data analysis and machine learning that would be great to just plug into Mathematica.
I didn't quite follow your argument on why MathLink/WSTP API is a better model then J/Link for a Python interface.
For myself, I find it much easier to put together simple looping constructs...procedural programming...in Python than with Mathematica. Although I like functional programming and see its power, I find that it can get kind of dense. Also, I like having classes around and doing object oriented programming. For example, I really like doing a list of items like so:
class Item:
def __init__(self, i, parent):
self.number = i
self.parent = parent
class List:
def __init__(self, n):
self.list = []
for i in range(n):
self.list.append(Item(i, self))
Using OO programming (sparingly, of course, mostly just to hold data) can really help to reason through what you are doing and I find Mathematica lacks such facilities, or, at least, I have not learned enough of Mathematica to not miss classes. Using the above structure, it is easy for me to put metadata type functions in the List class and item-specific functions in the Item class and loop through the list to examine the items, etc. But, what's missing is calling Mathematica straight from Python (or visa versa)!
Thanks again
