Sage: Open Source Mathematics Software. Bye Matlab, hello Python, thanks Sage « Bloody Fingers. For the past two months or so, I’ve been slowly migrating my scientific workflow (that’s a fancy way of saying “my chaotic data hacking”) from Matlab ((R) (TM) (C)) to Python. The results are overwhelmingly positive, so I’d like to rant about it a bit. First, some background. My work typically involves the analysis of tons of remote sensing observations contained in files of various formats (netCDF if I’m very lucky, HDF if I’m lucky, some weird non-standard binary thing if I’m not); all these files span terabytes and terabytes of hard drive space stored in racks in a big temperature-controlled room somewhere high in the sky.
I ssh to a central server on which all these drives are mounted; I then usually run there code in whatever language is the most convenient to analyze the data. Why Matlab After a few years of this, Matlab emerged as the best solution for several reasons: Why ! Now, the problems. But somewhere I always hid a secret wish… to use Python. Then came SAGE Success Like this: SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software.