HSF/PyHEP

Discussion of Python in High Energy Physics https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/activities/pyhep.html

Hans Dembinski

@HDembinski

DON'T USE PYTHON 2!

Lol

this field has evolved from enthusiast working in isolation 2 real interactivity in just a year or two. It's amazing how quickly that happened.

Luke Kreczko

@kreczko

the last one is what made a real difference though - e.g. I've seen many plotting tools rise and fall in isolation. Now we can rally around a few focused projects and stop wasting time ;)

Matthew Feickert

@matthewfeickert

agreed. It is nice to have projects that we can all be developers and contributors to (even if I just do some drive-by-developing PRs every few months)

Henry Schreiner

@henryiii

I was happy to see how many mentioned histogramming :)

Henry Schreiner

@henryiii

By the way, if you run python in macOS Catalina, the header at the top of Python’s startup says:

WARNING: Python 2.7 is not recommended.
This version is included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software.
Future versions of macOS will not include Python 2.7.
Instead, it is recommended that you transition to using 'python3' from within Terminal.

Henry Schreiner

@henryiii

Python just adopted a 12 month release cycle. Not sure why. 18 months was already too short IMO...

Maybe they were envious of Ruby’s annual Christmas Day release? :P

Eduardo Rodrigues

@eduardo-rodrigues

Indeed I'm also super happy with the very interesting feedback we got! Thanks again to everyone who spared a few minutes. It WILL help organising future activities such as workshops.

Yes the lightning talks were a lot about a way to get everyone to introduce itself to everyone else. I was hoping for more such talks but in the end I guess people were a bit shy … maybe because the session was a first? For sure we will do this again.

Hans Dembinski

@HDembinski

Yes the lightning talks were a lot about a way to get everyone to introduce itself to everyone else. I was hoping for more such talks but in the end I guess people were a bit shy … maybe because the session was a first? For sure we will do this again.

I think so, it is new and people don't yet know how to deal with this, but they will learn.

Lukas

@lukasheinrich

hi.. i have a python library for reading LHE files that seems to have been useful for people (it's been cited a bunch of times) even though currently it's quite barebones: https://github.com/lukasheinrich/pylhe

given that we have pyhepmc I thought we could fold this into scikit-hep

(and clean it up a bit)

if someone has somethign better i'm also happy to give up the name

Hans Dembinski

@HDembinski

@lukasheinrich There is a reader for LHE files in HepMC3, which will also be wrapped in pyhepmc at some point.

The advantage of that would be that you can use the existing HepMC3 interface to deal with this format.

Eduardo Rodrigues

@eduardo-rodrigues

Sounds like a merge of functionality would be best, then, if anything is not yet in pyhepmc, coming from pylhe? Agree on the mentioned advantage.

Lukas

@lukasheinrich

@HDembinski @eduardo-rodrigues sounds good to me. Is there any timeline for having this functionality in pyhepmc? One advantage I guess of the pylhe is that it doesn't require anything other than the python standard library to read the files, i.e. no build of HepMC is necessary

(it just uses ElementTree to parse the files)

Hans Dembinski

@HDembinski

Having something in pure Python is nice, although we can provide binary wheels these days and the disadvantage of having a compiled module goes away. I am not sure whether the speed of using ElementTree to parse will be competitive with a C++ library. We will only know for sure when both approaches are implemented. For a timeline, I don't have one, but seeing that this LHE files are getting traction, I should get started working on the bindings.

Lukas

@lukasheinrich

@HDembinski yes LHE files are quite popular already with the LHC pheno crowd (for ATLAS & CMS at least) so having nice bindings would be nice

Jim Pivarski

@jpivarski

I'm not sure what to think of this (I haven't done anything yet), but NumFOCUS, which sponsors NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Jupyter, Dask, and conda-forge, as well as some projects we don't frequently use, is for the first time asking for money, though they already have an impressive list of sponsors.

Henry Schreiner

@henryiii

Are they simply allowing donations, or asking for money? Allowing user contributions is not bad, IMO. Asking for it might be different.

Jim Pivarski

@jpivarski

@henryiii I found out about this through an email sent to PyData meetup members (PyData is under NumFOCUS). This is a fixed-duration campaign, like an NPR pledge break, not an open repository for donations, like Wikipedia.

To be clear, I'm not saying it's good or bad—I'm just a little surprised. It could be an attempt to diversify their funding sources so that it's not all corporate. I just don't know, so I thought of sharing it here, given that we depend strongly on these projects.

Jim Pivarski

@jpivarski

The use of StackOverflow has been taking off, and I'm fine being the only one writing answers until the community gets established. However, this morning there was a rather open-ended question about tricks for ML performance: https://stackoverflow.com/q/58817554/1623645 I gave some theoretical suggestions, but some of you might have actual experience with ML analyses in Python. If you contribute an answer, I'll upvote you! :)

Andrzej Novak

@andrzejnovak

Fun, it kind of looks like my problem as well. Upvotes to anyone who figures out a faster way to read stuff than root_numpy :)

Eduardo Rodrigues

@eduardo-rodrigues

@HDembinski, @lukasheinrich, on the pylhe & pyhepmc merging: could you Lukas then open an "issue" or 2 on the pyhepmc repo so that one can easily read what you would like to see available? Just so that it's easier to figure out what kind of user code one is talking about.
From a quick look there are no tests in there. Would you have a .lhe file to provide for testing? Thanks :-).

Nicholas Smith

@nsmith-

ah man can't we kill LHE? its so inefficient to use xml

Tai Sakuma

@TaiSakuma

@jpivarski very nice. i looked for a thumbs-up button - but no such thing in gitter.

Eduardo Rodrigues

@eduardo-rodrigues

@nsmith-, I run away from XML as much as I can ;-). I'm not a user of LHE files but others are ...

Matthieu Marinangeli

@marinang

@nsmith- does madgraph produce output files other than LHE files?

Nicholas Smith

@nsmith-

iirc sherpa can do h5 now, but not sure about madgraph.. likely not

Henry Schreiner

@henryiii

Does anyone have experince with PETSc4py? Someone is asking about it (not in HEP, but thought I’d ask)

benkrikler

@benkrikler

Learnt about OpenHub today. Played with their language comparison tool, which has this interesting trend: https://www.openhub.net/languages/compare?language_name%5B%5D=cpp&language_name%5B%5D=java&language_name%5B%5D=perl&language_name%5B%5D=python&language_name%5B%5D=r&language_name%5B%5D=matlab&language_name%5B%5D=-1&measure=contributors

Matthew Feickert

@matthewfeickert

Hi all. Tomorrow is the first day of the SciPy 2020 call for proposals: https://twitter.com/SciPyConf/status/1204141195095662594

I will be submitting one for pyhf and I hope that other people will be making submissions for talks and posters as well. It is a highly competitive candidate pool where they annually get hundreds of applications for a few tens of speaking spots (last year there were 168 applications for 60 spots), so I'd encourage everyone applying to take a look at talks from previous years (up on the Enthought YouTube channel) and applications to see what successful talks looked like.

If it is of interest, I have my proposal for a pyhf talk last year up on GitHub. It wasn't accepted for a talk, but it reviewed well enough that it was invited for a poster anyway. The reviewer comments are also included. https://github.com/matthewfeickert/SciPy2019-Proposal/

Matthew Feickert

@matthewfeickert

Follow up to the above

Important Talk & Poster Dates:

Dec 10, 2019:
- Talk & Poster call for proposals opens
Feb 11,2020:
- Talk & Poster submission deadline
April 13, 2020
- General conference speakers announced
May 22, 2020:
- Proceedings first draft submissions due
Jul 8-10, 2020:
- SciPy 2020 General Conference
Jul 30, 2020:
- SciPy 2020 final Proceedings published

Raahul Singh

@Raahul-Singh

Hi everyone!
I'm a sophomore computer science and engineering undergrad from the Indian Institute of Information Technology Sri City, India.

I'm new to Open Source Contributions. Though I really wish to do my part and contribute in anyway to CERN.

Could anyone please guide me here? 😅

Henry Schreiner

@henryiii

This sounds interesting (not useful ATM, AFAICT, but interesting): https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide/

(From this article: https://tryolabs.com/blog/2019/12/10/top-10-python-libraries-of-2019/ )

Henry Schreiner

@henryiii

And, unrelated, here’s a language popularity animation (as always, this varies a lot depending on the data used): https://twitter.com/marcusborba/status/1205819678842609664

Pratyush Das

@reikdas

I actually met the main author of pyodide last month at Scipy India :D

Henry Schreiner

@henryiii

https://orbifold.xyz/zen-of-python.html

And, since no one has posted it: https://pythonclock.org runs out tonight! Though, to be fair, the final release of Python 2.7 (2.7.18) actually comes out in April - tonight is just the code freeze.

Hans Dembinski

@HDembinski

The animation of Marcus Borba looks cool, but since he does not reveal where the data came from, it is unciteable...

I still enjoyed watching it. It is interesting to see how there is the age of Pascal, which fades, then comes the age of Java, etc. Now seems to be the age of Python :+1:

C++ is also still one of the top compiled languages.

Hans Dembinski

@HDembinski

The article about the Zen of Python is very good for those who do not click with the Zen of Python intuitively as I did. Most of it only starts to make sense when you gain some experience with designing software and fell into a few traps along the way. These guidelines are great. They are guidelines, not rules, but if you follow them, your software becomes much better.

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