Sonic Boom Ray Tracings

In the world of programming, some programming languages such as Fortran are used for their speed, with the drawback being the initial difficulty in learning this language and the incompatibility across platforms. Conversely scripting languages such as Python are selected for their increased readability, allowing one to easily create and understand the functions that occur while testing this program and ease of use across all operating systems. The drawback here however is that Python is comparatively much slower. We took a sonic boom propagation ray tracing program that was very difficult for the user to implement and ported it to python to improve the usability. This made the program much easier for the user to run however the additional time it took to run the code made it impracticable as a prediction took. Our goal was to take advantage of Python in such a way that we would maintain its intended readability while allowing it to function at speeds similar to lower level programming languages.