EuroPython: Interview of Paul F. Dubois of Numeric Python

[ Thanks to EuroPython for this link. ]

“E: When did you start using Python and how did you get
involved with the Numeric Python library?

“PD: In 1984 I wrote a system (“Basis”) for steering Fortran 77
codes with a Fortran-like interpreted array language that I
designed. This system was very successful and really changed the
way we did scientific computing — but it was F77-centric and it
was going to be hard to adapt it to the object-oriented world and
to Fortran 90. About 1994 I could see that I needed to design a
future for this system because we really depended on it. I was
doing research on this topic and had a prototype in progress when I
discovered Python. It was remarkably similar to my prototype and
the language design was better than mine. All it lacked was an
array language. We decided to go with Python and use our efforts to
get a Numeric extension written…”

Complete
Story