On 7/18/2013 1:35 PM, Philipp K. Janert wrote:
Question: What is the reason for these installation problems? Most languages/libs these days install w/o any problems. Why are the Python scientific libs (still?) so challenging in this regard.
It's hard because of scientific libs being written for very specific platforms and dependencies that aren't common. It's hard because of the number of options for these libs, compilers, and engines that can be plugged in and how they inter-operate (there are x-number of linear algebra libraries, y-number of Fortran compilers, and I'm pretty sure the exact number is 11 different graphics rendering engines). It's challenging in other languages to. Most of this stuff doesn't even exist on Windows without ridiculous amounts of work.
It's not even the Python part that's challenging. The Python scientific stack is Frankenstein monster of C and Fortran bits from outside the Python community. But we hear about it more with Python because what other language has a scientific stack that even starts to compare with Python's. Or what language makes tham as accessible. There's a reason for f4py and a reason for C extensions. They make these unwieldy libs accessible and usable without mountains of scaffolding. Python is a scripting language. That is, it is glue for all these systems language bits.
I'm going to recommend Enthought Canopy (the replacement for EPD). It's what I use for PyCamp just so I can make sure the Windows people get to see iPython Notebook in Pylab mode. It's the best include-all-the-difficult-libs all-in-one distribution you can find. And even it is pretty unstable and nonstandard. Won't work on Win 8 yet, either, although they say "coming soon."
-- Sincerely, Chris Calloway http://nccoos.org/Members/cbc office: 3313 Venable Hall phone: (919) 599-3530 mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599
