Trends in programming languages for neuroscience simulations.
Neuroscience simulators allow scientists to express models in terms of biological concepts, without having to concern themselves with low-level computational details of their implementation. The expressiveness, power and ease-of-use of the simulator interface is critical in efficiently and accurately translating ideas into a working simulation. We review long-term trends in the development of programmable simulator interfaces, and examine the benefits of moving from proprietary, domain-specific languages to modern dynamic general-purpose languages, in particular Python, which provide neuroscientists with an interactive and expressive simulation development environment and easy access to state-of-the-art general-purpose tools for scientific computing.
Davison
Andrew P
AP
Unité de Neurosciences Intégratives et Computationnelles, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Gif sur Yvette, France.
Hines
Michael L
ML
Muller
Eilif
E