I may have been too harsh in using the term 'disaster'. I am certainly glad that scipy exists, but I use it with extreme caution.
First, it is quite disorganized. Say you want to solve an ODE. First, you have to know to import scipy.integrate (importing scipy doesn't give you scipy.integrate, for some reason, and why would you guess that solving ODEs fits under the 'integrate' package anyway?). Next, you then find all of the following: scipy.integrate.ode scipy.integrate.odeint scipy.integrate.odepack.odeint scipy.integrate.vode (not to mention scipy.integrate._odepack and scipy.integrate._dop) Next, the documentation is out of sync. After you (somehow) decide which to use, you read the documentation but later discover that it is wrong (doesn't correctly list the arguments that a function takes) in some places. Finally, there are bugs. You find an ODE solver for stiff problems and apply it but discover (as my numerical analysis students did last spring) that it doesn't work properly for stiff systems, as the time to solve scales linearly with the problem stiffness, even when the accuracy tolerances are extremely loose. I should add that I did eventually find a stiff solver among these packages that worked properly. But it was enough of a headache that now I just use my own code instead. I find that much of scipy has problems like this. -David On Sep 1, 8:31 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 1:25 AM, Juanlu001 <juanlu...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Sorry David, could you clarify what parts of Scipy do you think are a > > disaster? Just for curiosity. I am a student and I am trying nowadays to use > > these Python packages to perform numerical computations, and I am very > > interested on what is being said in this thread. > > I would also like to here what parts David is referring to. > > Personally, I've used scipy for various things and have been quite > pleased with everything I've used from scipy, except the stats module. > All the optimization and special functions (say) that I used seemed > pretty good. The stats module definitely needed more work. It may > have improved a lot since then, but I don't know. > > -- William -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
