looking past the hubris in your email, you're talking about dependency management [DM] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell) which exists in libraries, OSes and pretty much anywhere there is coupling between reusable code. It can be solved statically by linking against specific versions which work together but is a little more challenging to solve dynamically. There are tools in python to manage this though - http://www.pip-installer.org/ for compile time and http://www.virtualenv.org/ for runtime.
java has maven, gradle, etc for compile time DM and tech like osgi for runtime DM. apt-get on *nix, ports on bsd are tools on OSes for addressing the same issues. They all work rather painlessly without 'ridiculous amounts of work'. see http://goo.gl/IzI1i - Nimret Sandhu http://www.nimret.org On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 11:54 AM, Chris Calloway <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
