On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
I don't see why this shouldn't be the sincere replies, I think these easy answers are also the right answer for most people. maybe I would add 4) writing code for a few hundred thousand users is a big responsibility and a bit scary Except for a few "core" c developers, most contributors contribute to parts of numpy, best example Pierre and masked arrays, or specific functions. Life goes on for most developers in the application areas, I guess. For example I'm very glad about the time that Pauli is spending on scipy. numpy is "great" [1] Josef > > Best, > > Matthew > > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/files/stats/timeline?dates=2000-01-11+to+2012-04-25 http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=python-numpy > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list > NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org > http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
