Social Analysis and Modeling for Python

Bishara Gabriel bgabriel at cloudthunder.com
Wed Sep 29 11:37:08 EDT 2004


I encourage feedback from all parties and especially those which would 
like to be directly involved (I may include you in the grant proposal 
and budget).  Send me your comments!

------->

Project Objective

We seek to introduce the advantages of object-oriented programming to
the realm of social sciences.  We believe the fields thereof (economics,
history, sociology, political science, etc.), have much to gain from
OOP’s ability to represent social constructs.  Particularly, we have
found Python to be well suited to the rapid formulation of social models
due to its syntactic simplicity, outstanding support for object-oriented
programming, and comprehensive libraries.  Unfortunately, most academics
in the aforementioned fields are unaware of the capabilities, let alone
applicability, of programmatic representation.  Those who do are
typically put off by the inadequacy and complexity of more traditional
languages such as C and C++.  We therefore propose to disseminate an
understanding among these fields of the ability to develop social models
and represent social constructs via the rapid modeling capabilities of
the Python language.  We seek to demonstrate how Python presents to them
limited costs in production time via its language features, and to show
how social models can be mentally approached in such a way that there
exists a one-to-one correlation between their theoretical model and the
Python equivalent.

See the rest of the proposal at:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~bgabriel/Social_Analysis_&_Modeling_in_Python.pdf



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