  New and upgraded radio interferometers produce data at massive rates and will
require significant improvements in analysis techniques to reach their promised
levels of performance in a routine manner. Until these techniques are fully
developed, productivity and accessibility in scientific programming
environments will be key bottlenecks in the pipeline leading from data-taking
to research results. We present an open-source software package, miriad-python,
that allows access to the MIRIAD interferometric reduction system in the Python
programming language. The modular design of MIRIAD and the high productivity
and accessibility of Python provide an excellent foundation for rapid
development of interferometric software. Several other projects with similar
goals exist and we describe them and compare miriad-python to them in detail.
Along with an overview of the package design, we present sample code and
applications, including the detection of millisecond astrophysical transients,
determination and application of nonstandard calibration parameters,
interactive data visualization, and a reduction pipeline using a directed
acyclic graph dependency model analogous to that of the traditional Unix tool
"make". The key aspects of the miriad-python software project are documented.
We find that miriad-python provides an extremely effective environment for
prototyping new interferometric software, though certain existing packages
provide far more infrastructure for some applications. While equivalent
software written in compiled languages can be much faster than Python, there
are many situations in which execution time is profitably exchanged for speed
of development, code readability, accessibility to nonexpert programmers, quick
interlinking with foreign software packages, and other virtues of the Python
language.
