AUTHOR=Davison Andrew P., Hines Michael , Muller Eilif 

TITLE=Trends in programming languages for neuroscience simulations

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 3 - 2009

YEAR=2009

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/neuro.01.036.2009

DOI=10.3389/neuro.01.036.2009

ISSN=1662-453X

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.