Monday

In recent years, community-developed open source Python pacakages such as Astropy, SunPy and SpacePy have gained significant popularity. These projects provide common tools and data structures useful to their respective disciplines, and benefit from Python's easy-to-learn syntax and the increasing range of other scientific tools written in Python. Plasma physics currently lacks such a package, and the current state of available software in this field presents a high barrier of entry to new users.

The PlasmaPy community has therefore begun development of a Python package for plasma physics following the example of Astropy, SunPy, etc.
PlasmaPy intends to provide commonly-used plasma physics functions, easy-to-use simulation codes, eigenmode solvers, and tools for visualising and analysing data from both simulations and experiments. We aim to use best practices for programming in the development of PlasmaPy, including version control, unit tests and extensive documentation.