Hi, On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Travis Oliphant <tra...@continuum.io> wrote: >> >> Do you agree that Numpy has not been very successful in recruiting and >> maintaining new developers compared to its large user-base? >> >> Compared to - say - Sympy? >> >> Why do you think this is? > > I think it's mostly because it's infrastructure that is a means to an end. > I certainly wasn't excited to have to work on NumPy originally, when my main > interest was SciPy. I've come to love the interesting plateau that NumPy > lives on. But, I think it mostly does the job it is supposed to do. > The fact that it is in C is also not very sexy. It is also rather > complicated with a lot of inter-related parts. > > I think NumPy could do much, much more --- but getting there is going to be a > challenge of execution and education. > > You can get to know the code base. It just takes some time and patience. > You also have to be comfortable with compilers and building software just to > tweak the code. > > >> >> Would you consider asking that question directly on list and asking >> for the most honest possible answers? > > I'm always interested in honest answers and welcome any sincere perspective.
Of course, there are potential explanations: 1) Numpy is too low-level for most people 2) The C code is too complicated 3) It's fine already, more or less are some obvious ones. I would say there are the easy answers. But of course, the easy answer may not be the right answer. It may not be easy to get right answer [1]. As you can see from Alan Isaac's reply on this thread, even asking the question can be taken as being in bad faith. In that situation, I think you'll find it hard to get sincere replies. Best, Matthew [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
