On 18 April 2014 16:58, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: > As part of thrashing out the respective distribution ecosystem roles > of pip and conda (still a work in progress), we're at least converging > on the notion that there are actually now *two* main ways of consuming > Python: as a "software integrator" (the way most of us have > traditionally consumed it, and the way that dominates most project > documentation outside the scientific Python community) and as an "end > user" (the way Linux system administrators have long consumed it, and > the way scientists, financial analysts and folks just learning Python > are likely best off consuming it). > > Making these different personas explicit is a process that has barely > begun (this email is mostly based on some conversations I had in > person at PyCon and via email during the sprints), but here's the gist > (based on listing examples):
Interesting perspective. However, I'm not convinced it's complete. Specifically, there's one group of people who I encounter relatively often, who don't seem to me to fit well into either category you're proposing. That is, (Windows in my experience, but maybe Linux as well) users who want to write "simple scripts" and for whom batch files or similar are not sufficient. Such people typically don't have the sort of "single application area" focus that your "end user" category seems to imply, but on the other hand they don't really fit the "software integrators" role in the sense of necessarily being comfortable setting up their own development environment. I worry that your classification risks ignoring that group (maybe because Unix users are well served with other alternatives than Python for this type of task, or because on Unix "use the system Python" is the right answer). Your list of "end user" targeted distributions seem to be limited to: - Linux distribution vendors - Vendors focused on the essentially scientific community (in the broadest sense) - Embedded Python That's very far from being complete coverage of all the people *I'd* like to be able to recommend Python to. Specifically, unless we're not interested in "generic" Windows users, I think we need to offer *some* form of equivalent of the OS-packaged Python on Linux for Windows users. That's what the python.org builds, plus pip, wheels and PyPI, give for Windows users now. Hmm, if we assume that supporting that remains a priority, is what you're really saying that we *don't* try to extend that to work for Linux/OSX, as doing so competes with the OS vendors - but rather we see python.org binaries and binary infrastructure like wheels as being focused on the Windows user experience? (I wish I'd been at PyCon, this would have been a very interesting discussion to have face to face. Email isn't ideal for this...) Paul. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
