Davison A.P., Hines M. and Muller E. (2009) Trends in programming languages for neuroscience simulations. Frontiers in Neuroscience 3:3: doi:10.3389/neuro.01.036.2009-.
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..
