Hi everyone, Here is an excerpt from a blog post by Kohnrad hinsen abour how Python is not a perfect solution for long-term software stability, even when only using the numerical computation Python package. The full text is at http://khinsen.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/python-as-a-platform-for-reproducible-research/
8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<---------- Python as a platform for reproducible research The other day I was looking at the release notes for the recently published release 1.8 of NumPy, the library that is the basis for most of the Scientific Python ecosystem. As usual, it contains a list of new features and improvements, but also sections such as “dropped support” (for Python 2.4 and 2.5) and “future changes”, to be understood as “incompatible changes that you should start to prepare for”. [...] From the point of view of reproducible research, all these changes are bad news. They mean that libraries and scripts that work today will fail to work with future NumPy releases, in ways that their users, who are usually not the authors, cannot easily understand or fix. Actively maintained libraries will of course be adapted to changes in NumPy, but much, perhaps most, scientific software is not actively maintained. A PhD student doing computational reasearch might well publish his/her software along with the thesis, but then switch subjects, or leave research altogether, and never look at the old code again. There are also specialized libraries developed by small teams who don’t have the resources to do as much maintenance as they would like. [...] One popular attitude is to say: Just run old Python packages with old versions of Python, NumPy, etc. This is an option as long as the versions you need are recent enough that they can still be built and installed on a modern computer system. And even then, the practical difficulties of working with parallel installation of multiple versions of several packages are considerable [...] -- Nicolas LIMARE http://nicolas.limare.net/ pgp:0xFA423F4F
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