Modeling life on Earth –- an object-oriented (Python?) challenge

[quartese at gmail.com]

Dear List,

I have to start this email by saying that I have recently attended EuroPython in Florence, and it was the best and better organized conference I have ever attended in 14 years of international meetings.

I apologize if this is off topic, but I read in the list's description that “[p]retty much anything Python-related is fair game for discussion”.

Although I am not a Python developer, I decided to attend EuroPython in search for a programmer interested in collaborating in the Python project I briefly describe below.

I use ecosystem models implemented with a procedural paradigm in a language different from Python (Pascal, for the records). I would like to migrate these ecosystem models (and code) to an object-oriented paradigm using Python, as I have come to believe its expressiveness would help a lot get the semantics right, rather than simply split procedural code into objects corresponding to ecological elements. What's more, our models use physiological analogies among the different levels of the food chain or web, and this makes them amenable to an even higher level of object-oriented abstraction given adequate expressiveness.

The goal is to go beyond the currently (mostly) formal implementation of the object-oriented paradigm in ecological models. To do that, I would need help from an expert Python programmer (who also has some math skills, knows English, and can work in the Rome area, or at least central Italy). I need help because I am a Python beginner with limited programming experience in general, and hence my contribution will mainly be the ecosystem modeling insight.

At EuroPython, I gave a lightning talk about the project that can be found on YouTube
http://youtu.be/iUNbgNuN0qY?t=31m50s

As I already made some very promising contacts at EuroPyton with developers that are interested and willing to help, and many people shared their views and provided useful insight into the issue (thanks!), this post is meant to get further feedback on my idea and possibly reach other interested developers.

Kindly contact me if you have any interest in the idea and time to devote it, as it is becoming a funded project.

Kind regards, thanks for any hint, and apologies for the many inaccuracies,

Luigi