.. _introduction:

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Introduction
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The use of the Python programming language in computational
neuroscience has been growing steadily over the past few years. The
maturation of two important open source projects, the scientific
libraries `NumPy <http://numpy.scipy.org>`_ and 
`SciPy <http://www.scipy.org>`_, gives access to a large
collection of scientific functions which rival in size and speed those from 
well known commercial alternatives such as `Matlab`\ |reg| from The MathWorks\ |trade|.

Furthermore, the flexible and dynamic nature of Python offers 
scientific programmers the opportunity to quickly develop efficient and
structured software while maximizing prototyping and reusability
capabilities.

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With over 20,000 downloads since its first public release in 2004, MDP
has become a widely used Python scientific software. It has minimal
dependencies, requiring only the NumPy numerical extension, is
completely platform-independent, and is available in several Linux
distribution, and the `Python(x,y) <http://www.pythonxy.com>`_
scientific Python distribution.

As the number of users and contributors is increasing, MDP appears
to be a good candidate for becoming a community-driven common
repository of user-supplied, freely available, Python implemented data
processing algorithms.
