how do "real" python programmers work?

[Alan J. Salmoni]

Hi Brian,

I'm sure I don't qualify as an "experienced Python programmer", but I
write lots of code usually for statistical analysis (via numarray) or
for GUI work.

The way I work is to use an editor and Idle for interactive testing of
small routines.

My choice of editor is SciTE. I'll have different modules (both working
and testing modules) in a range of different tabs and use the built-in
execute code function (F5) to run and check errors. Idle is then used
to test small functions and explore when I need to. The editor gets
more of the GUI work and Idle gets more of the statistics work - the
ability to test routines on the fly is enormously helpful and quite a
productive way to work.

Say I was looking at some linear algebra and I want an SSCP matrix.
Just enter the data into variable 'X' then:

>>> Xd = X - average(X) # deviations matrix
>>> Xdt = transpose(Xd)
>>> SSCP = dot(Xdt, Xd)

and there's my matrix. However, the useful thing is that the transposed
X matrix is still there so if I go on to a multiple regression, I can
use it there too.  For statistics, it's tremendously useful,
particularly if the analysis doesn't go as planned (eg, presence of
outliers) and further exploration is needed. Perhaps later I need the
variances of each variable:

>>> diagonal(SSCP)

And out they appear without having to go through an entire program.
Even though Python is slower than well-written Fortran, the interactive
nature can make statistical analysis quicker.

All the best!

Alan.