cython and sympy

looks like cython is the new coolness for compiling python-ishness to c. they forked from pyrex last year to meet the needs of the sage project, and they seem to have a more active development. plus, they intend to get picked up into the main python distro. and speaking of sage, i remember giving it a spin a while ago. i was impressed at the scope, but i was disappointed at how so many kitchen sinks could bog me down. i think it took more than a day to compile. there's one reason to give sympy a chance. looks like they have some serious support and heavyweight devs (including the author of the original pyginac and one of the authors of the more recent swiginac), so i'm hopeful about where that goes. and they're integrating with sage, too, so it shouldn't be hard to migrate to sage if necessary. sage, meanwhile, looks to be a contender with maple and mathematica. o joyful day! also, a couple of projects use sage-style packages but don't make you install all of them at once: http://code.google.com/p/spdproject/ http://femhub.org/ ...and i found out that matlab now uses mupad instead of maple for its symbolic stuff. interesting.