I heard him speak at Stanford a few weeks ago. He made some great points about academia having a lot to learn from the open-source community. In summary, he said that academics should strive to make their research more open and reproducible, and that version control tools like git and presentation tools like IPython can help make that happen.<p>The talk was broadly similar to the slides I found here: <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~vcs/AAAS2011/1102_aaas_reproducibility_fperez.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.stanford.edu/~vcs/AAAS2011/1102_aaas_reproducibil...</a><p>If Fernando is able to convince academics to foster the same sort of culture that the open-source community has, his influence would be very great indeed.
I'd just like to add my voice to the others to say I love IPython. It's absolutely essential for my daily work, and it freed me from the shackles of Matlab. Python is a lovely language on its own, but it really shines when you add a good interactive prompt.
Glad to hear this, I use ipython on a daily basis, and chatted with him at euroscipy a while back, he is a very nice guy! I think he comments on here every now and then, too, so in case you read this: Thanks and congratulations!