Yhat develops Rodeo, a Python IDE for data science

Yhat, a startup that makes software to let data scientists work together on projects, today revealed Rodeo, an interesting new open-source tool for working with data in the browser.

“Rodeo is an IDE [integrated development environment] that’s built expressly for doing data science in Python,” explained Yhat cofounder Greg Lamp in a blog post today. “Think of it as a lightweight alternative to the IPython Notebook.”

IPython Notebook has become common in the workflow of many data scientists who use Python — a common language for doing data science, right up there with R. But Lamp wanted something different.

“I like the IPython Notebook for presentations and tutorials, but I often find it a little cumbersome for day to day work,” he wrote. “I generally prefer to work in a fairly minimalist environment like Sublime Text or VIM. Juxtaposed with the notebook, and it makes the notebook feel really bloated.”

The adoption of Rodeo could make more data scientists aware of Yhat, which is competing in the small but growing market for data science collaboration tools.

You can find the source code for Rodeo on GitHub here.