[SciPy-User] peer review of scientific software

[zetah]

Jason Grout wrote:
>I'm not sure where in the discussion I should post this, but I wanted to 
>make a comment about the prevalence and power of tools like Excel that I 
>just realized.  I've been watching Brett Victor's videos recently, and I 
>just realized that a spreadsheet, with its initial orientation to 
>concrete data, does a good job of implementing his "ladder of 
>abstraction" [1].  You first work with concrete data, then you 
>parametrize the results (e.g., write formulas for the cells), etc. With 
>programming, we need to basically come up with the abstraction right 
>away, which is more difficult.  It seems like there is a good tool in 
>the middle ground there that would basically be a spreadsheet that 
>writes your python program for you, letting you play with the data 
>interactively, but the parametrization of your operations writes the 
>python code.

Same thought here, glad you wrote that

Following the stream of discussion, pandas dataframe as object is annotated with metadata and allows different ways of manipulating this annotated data. If some higher state of mind (armed with skills and vision) can see this as interactive helper in IPython Notebook (called as magic command), perhaps it can sell itself.

So I'm not talking about visible streadsheet of million element array (like array showed in Matlab), but just metadata scheme and numbered axis. Numbered axis could be thorough thought manipulator on basic numpy array, while some advanced featured available to pandas dataframe, as it offers diverse transformation potentials

This helper could provide filter, but not filter as in Excel, but filter as numpy array ufuncs...
I can't see the sneak preview right away, but hopefully that's not a problem

Oh let someone sees this as a challenge :)