If you were to plan out a public relations campaign for the scientific/financial community, how would you go about it?

Hi there, not sure if this reply was to ask post author. What I asked myself a while ago was "how did Python and the NumPy/SciPy/matplotlib stack become popular in these communities?"

The first thing that's vital is to have great tools and libraries available that cover most if not all needs and are easy to install and easy to integrate together. For example some people have said that PDL's integrated plotting libraries PGPLOT and PLplot are not as good as the competitors. This can be fairly easily improved and we've talked about it on the PDL mailing list. Perl R integration using Statistics::R is not nearly as complete an interface as say RPy2 and I've mentioned that to the maintainer. People on PDL also have been discussing making a full-fledged wxPerl PDL IDE with embedded plotting which would be a awesome for PDL and the knowledge to do most of it is already there from the Padre community.

With the tools and libraries there and easy to install and use then it's about communicating to the scientific and financial communities that you have a stack that is as good if not better than the competitors and what advantages your stack has. This can happen organically without need for direct communication if you have great tools, a la "if you build it they will come", people start using it and telling others, etc.