I cannot believe I am writing this blog post, but for a variety of reasons, I now spend about half my time programming in python. It is still pretty useless as a tool for doing the thing for which I normally get hired, but it is great as glue, for machine learning, and for other types of utility programming. As or solving hard machine vision and image processing problems–for that C++ is still the king for both speed of performance and speed of development. In both my day job and for my PhD research, I have a lot of the C++ vision code I need already coded up so it runs fast and does what I want. Now I need to make stuff play nicely with GUI programmers and other user so I am doing that in Python. The thing I hate to admit is that I really like it quite a lot and I CAN go faster with stuff like Scikit-Learn, matplotlib, and other great tools.