Spyder

Well, just upgraded to Ubuntun 10.10: works liek a charm and I quite like the (slightly) different look. But that's not what this - short - blog is about. It's about Spyder.

At work I often use Matlab, nice software but too expensive to - legally - use at home. But now I've found an open source alternative that might be able to replace it for a large part. At least for home use:

Spyder : "a Python development environment with advanced editing, interactive testing, debugging and introspection features. It is especially recommended for scientific computing thanks to NumPy (linear algebra), SciPy (signal and image processing), matplotlib (interactive 2D/3D plotting) and MayaVi’s mlab (interactive 3D visualization) support."

I've only been playing with it for a couple of days now, but I'm still enthusiatic about it.

As mentioned Spyder is IDE for the python programming language. The great thing about Spyder is - just like Matlab - that you don't have to compile your code to run it. I've got little to no programming experience outside of Matlab, but I found is rather easy to use Spyder.

So if you're looking for something like a home version of Matlab, give it a try!