title: Trends in programming languages for neuroscience simulations.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Unité de Neurosciences Intégratives et Computationnelles, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Gif sur Yvette, France.
authors.forename: Andrew P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Davison
authors.forename: Michael L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Hines
authors.forename: Eilif
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Muller