Is Python appropriate for algorithms focused on scientific computing?

Posted by gmatt on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by gmatt
Published on 2010-05-27T01:42:41Z Indexed on 2010/05/27 2:21 UTC
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My interests in programming lie mainly in algorithms, and lately I have seen many reputable researchers write a lot of their code in python. How easy and convenient is python for scientific computing? Does it have a library of algorithms that compares to matlab's? Is Python a scripting language or does it compile? Is it a great language for prototyping an algorithm? How long would it take me to learn enough of it to be productive provided I know C well and OO programming somewhat? Is it OO based?

Sorry for the condensed format of questions, but I'm very curious and was hoping a more experienced programmer could help me out.

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