Python

And now for something completely different...

Welcome to my personal Python homepage. At the moment you will only find some links to other sites, as I haven't had time to put together some stuff of general interest.

Python is a portable, object-oriented and last but not least easy-to-learn scripting language which can be used for everything from throwaway-scripting to complete applications .

Because it is quite easy to read and to understand, and because it is portable and especially because much stuff for processing PDB-files (containing information about molecular models (Proteins, RNA, organic and inorganic molecules) already existed, I had chosen Python as the implementation language for some data-parsing and conversion tools I desperately needed during and shortly after my diploma-work.

More recently I have written some glue-logic for my Ph.D. work (macromolecular crystallography) which does more or less similar things as the GROMOS96-scripts: Input-generation and some logfile-parsing.

I got lucky in being paid to program in Python during my industry-carreer at Exelixis, BASF Plant Science as well as BASF Business Services.

And of course Python is essential, if you like Pymol, a molecular graphics program which uses it as its extension and scripting language.

To be somehow usefull, here is the proof, that python is good and Java and Perl are evil:

<python> print "Hello world!" </python>

Although this will have to be written as

<python> print("Hello world!") </python>

from now on, still not bad compared to Java or Visual Basic.

If you still don't believe me, try this

<python> from __future__ import braces </python>

And if you still don't believe me, read this

http://xkcd.com/353/

Still no content here...

Asteroids

Because there is an ultra-cool Java-client for the Asteroids-bot competition on heise.de, I'd like to port some of that stuff to Python. See what comes out of that...

Links

• http://www.heise.de/ct/creativ/08/02/details/
• http://www.heise.de/ct/projekte/machmit/asteroids/wiki
• http://www.heise.de/ct/foren/S-c-t-9-2008-S-176-creativ-08-Programmierwettbewerb/forum-135513/list/

Other exits

• Some usefull extensions
  • iPython -an enhanced interactive Python shell.
  • Matplotlib -Reporting
  • Reportlab -Plotting
• Python and Bioinformatics
  • Biopython -Sequence manipulation et al. Like BioPerl
  • PyCogent -A similar toolkit, but aimed at genomic biology
  • pygr -Another package in the same direction,
  • bx-python -and yet another one
  • TAMO -sequence motif analysis in Python