I would like to work on a programming project in my spare time and would like to know if there is a project where I can help the science community in some way?
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I would like to work on a programming project in my spare time and would like to know if there is a project where I can help the science community in some way?
Sure, plenty! I see I’m not the first to think of numerical computation libraries like Numpy/Scipy – the code in that is actually fairly mature but they could certainly use help documenting. There’s also GNU Octave, which does much of the same things as Numpy but doesn’t require Python. A slightly related area in which there’s a lot of work to do is computer algebra systems (CAS), basically open source equivalents of Mathematica; for example Maxima, and more are listed at http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wdj/sigsam/opensource_math.html. You could also help with visualization libraries, i.e. creation of 2D and 3D plots and figures. For Scipy the most commonly used plot generator is Matplotlib, for example. There are also loads of more specialized data visualization tools that I’m sure you can find with a few searches.
One area that I personally think needs a lot of work is creating GUIs for the programs mentioned in the previous paragraph; one major advantage that commercial programs like Matlab and Mathematica enjoy over their open source equivalents is easy-to-use graphical interfaces. Having a nice usable interface would be great for scientists who may not be skilled in command-line-fu, but open source projects have a long way to go if they’re going to catch up.