[choffstein]

wesm, I can't thank you enough for this library.

I own and operate a quantitative finance business. Pandas (+ numpy) has been a godsend. Not only do I not have to pay for matlab licenses, but even the less experience programmers on my team have been insanely productive.

Thank you.

[skierscott]

What do you see the advantages of Python/pandas/numpy/etc over matlab as? Do you use any toolboxes?

[choffstein]

Basically, pandas, numpy, and matplotlib give me everything I could have wanted out of matlab from a numerical capabilities and graphing perspective.

In my opinion, matlab's excellent object inspection and debugging capabilities can be replaced with strict testing standards in your code-base.

On top of that, I get to use a whole slew of libraries that are non mathematically related -- frameworks for web services, accessing ftp servers, sending e-mails -- a lot of automated "utility" stuff.

And it is all "free". Fantastic.

[hogu]

not the person you're responding to, however I also made the change in the financial industry for a variety of reasons.

but the main one for me, was that python does non-math things much better than matlab. Since python is a general purpose language you can go from analysis to production application much faster, whereas with matlab it usually involved getting a software developer to rewrite it in java.

We used to take our python analysis code, wrap it up in a web app, and then use that to server risk information to traders, and it was quite easy to do so.

[b_emery]

Sounds like an interesting business. The link in your profile seems to be invalid, fyi.

[choffstein]

It was my personal site that I recently "scrubbed" off the web. I updated my profile for my business site. Thanks for the reminder.