Re: [Phonopy-users] Python version

[Atsushi T. <atz...@gm...>]

Hi,

I fully agree with what Jan wrote. For me, to make code 'readable' is
most important. Numpy makes a code further readable. By more readable
code, we make less bugs. The most time consuming part of software
development is fixing bugs (at least for me). To reduce bugs and to
easy bug fixing significantly reduce the cost of development. This is
important for developers.

In a scientific programming, computational performance is also
important, but phonopy doesn't require a lot of computational demands.
So usually the combination of python and numpy is quite good enough.
For some bottle necks, C is used to implement and the C functions are
called from python via python C-API. We have to be more carefully when
writing code in C, since it offers us more opportunity to create bugs
than python. In my case, I first develop in python and see the
performance. If I find bottle necks in performance, I port python code
to C. This porting is much easier than writing C code directly because
there already exists a working example in python. This is super when
challenging something new.

Togo

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Jan Jaeken <jan...@ug...> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Python has been gaining much popularity because it is easy to learn and
> produces very readable code. Anyone who has any programming experience
> should be able to pick it up with minimal effort. Each language has
> strengths and weaknesses, but Python's main strength is how much can be done
> with just a few lines of simple code, writing a program takes little time
> and effort. It's basically executable pseudo-code. I don't know if any
> converter exists, though I would assume it would produce horrible fortran
> code, as automated converters do not care for human readability.
>
> On compatibility: as far as I know, every new python version can run older
> python code, yet old versions sometimes have trouble with new code, because
> new features are added in new versions.
>
> A great python tutorial can be found here:
> http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/
>
> With regards,
> Jan Jaeken
>
>
>
> On 25/06/13 10:04, Suza W wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Could you anyone please explain me why Python is more advantageous than old
> good Fortran ?
> To me, Fortran and gnuplot are much easy to understand; and each new Fortran
> version
> is compatible to its older avatar. Is there any converter available which
> can convert phonopy
> to phonofort ? Or, is there a simplest tutorial available which can help one
> to understand Python
> used in phonopy ?
>
> Thanks & Regards,
> Suza
>
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 2:48 AM, Atsushi Togo <atz...@gm...> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> lib directory is generated by setup.sh if it doesn't exit.
>> I'm not very sure which versions of python are required for phonopy. I
>> think python 2.4 or later is OK. Sometimes I unintentionally use more
>> recent syntax. So if you have any problem on that, please let me know,
>> though I can not support all the python versions.
>>
>> Togo
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 12:17 AM, Carlo Motta <MO...@tc...> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I have a couple of questions concerning the installation of phonopy.
>> > Is there any minimum requirement on the python version in order to make
>> > phonopy work?
>> >
>> > I read on the manual that, before running the "setup.py install"
>> > command, one should define
>> > export PYTHONPATH=~/phonopy-1.3/lib/python
>> >
>> > Actually, after uncompressing the tar package, I see no "/lib"
>> > directory. Which should be the path to export then?
>> >
>> > Thank you very much in advance,
>> >
>> > Carlo
>
>
>
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-- 
Atsushi Togo
http://atztogo.github.com/
atz...@gm...