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Dag Sverre Seljebotn | 1 Aug 2009 11:57
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Re: SciPy Foundation

I am going to play the devil's advocate here -- I'm not into this in order
to make myself enemies, I just have some sincere questions.

Joe Harrington wrote:
> I define success as popular adoption in preference to commercial
> packages.  I believe in vote-with-your-feet: this goal will not be
> reached until all aspects of the package and its presentation to the
> world exceed those of our commercial competition.  Scipy is now a
> grass roots effort, but that takes it only so far.  Other projects,
> such as OpenOffice and Sage, don't follow this model and do produce
> quality products that compete with commercial offerings, at least on
> open-source platforms.  Before we can even hope for that, we have to
> do the following:
>

<snip>

> - Public communication
>   - A real marketing plan
>   - Executing on that plan
>   - Web site geared toward multiple audiences, run by experts at that
>     kind of communication
>   - More webinars, conference booths, training, aimed at all levels
>   - Demos, testimonials, topical forums, all showcased

A thing OpenOffice.org and Sage both have is a very clear sense of
direction and a clearly stated goal.

SciPy might also have that for all I know, but I must admit I haven't
understood what it is in the past year following the SciPy and NumPy
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josef.pktd | 1 Aug 2009 14:47
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Re: SciPy Foundation

On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 5:57 AM, Dag Sverre
Seljebotn<dagss <at> student.matnat.uio.no> wrote:
> I am going to play the devil's advocate here -- I'm not into this in order
> to make myself enemies, I just have some sincere questions.
>
> Joe Harrington wrote:
>> I define success as popular adoption in preference to commercial
>> packages.  I believe in vote-with-your-feet: this goal will not be
>> reached until all aspects of the package and its presentation to the
>> world exceed those of our commercial competition.  Scipy is now a
>> grass roots effort, but that takes it only so far.  Other projects,
>> such as OpenOffice and Sage, don't follow this model and do produce
>> quality products that compete with commercial offerings, at least on
>> open-source platforms.  Before we can even hope for that, we have to
>> do the following:
>>
>
> <snip>
>
>> - Public communication
>>   - A real marketing plan
>>   - Executing on that plan
>>   - Web site geared toward multiple audiences, run by experts at that
>>     kind of communication
>>   - More webinars, conference booths, training, aimed at all levels
>>   - Demos, testimonials, topical forums, all showcased
>
> A thing OpenOffice.org and Sage both have is a very clear sense of
> direction and a clearly stated goal.
>
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josef.pktd | 1 Aug 2009 17:29
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Re: nbinom.ppf

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Robert Kern<robert.kern <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 20:11, <josef.pktd <at> gmail.com> wrote:
>> That's better. It took me a while to understand the logic behind the
>> way the ceiling error is corrected. The same pattern is also followed
>> by the other discrete distributions that define a _ppf method. It is
>> cleaner then the epsilon correction, but takes longer to figure out
>> what it does.
>>
>> To understand the logic more easily and to be DRY, it would be better
>> to replace the duplication of the _cdf method directly with a call to
>> self._cdf.
>> For example, in changeset 4673, Robert, you changed the _cdf method to
>> use betainc instead of nbdtr, but not the _ppf method. Without the
>> code duplication, partial corrections could be more easily avoided.
>>
>> Is there a reason not to call self._cdf instead?
>
> Nope. Go ahead.
>
> --
> Robert Kern
>
> "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
> enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
> though it had an underlying truth."
>  -- Umberto Eco
> _______________________________________________
> Scipy-dev mailing list
> Scipy-dev <at> scipy.org
> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-dev
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Joe Harrington | 1 Aug 2009 18:20
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Re: SciPy Foundation

Dag wrote:
> I have seen email threads asking
> what the SciPy goal is, without any clear resolution (?).

How's this for a goal/mission statement (for SciPy, IDL, and Matlab):

(The toolstack) is a professional-quality numerical computation and
visualization environment that supports convenient handling of
numerical arrays, provides a rich set of basic tools and algorithms
for science and engineering, and supports a variety of both general
and discipline-specific application software.  It is easy for
numerically savvy teens to learn, but rich enough to support the most
complex of professional applications.  It can be run both
non-interactively and interactively, with the latter featuring both
GUI and rich command-line interfaces.  It comes with full
documentation, is easy to install and run on all popular platforms,
has a strong online user community spanning all disciplines, and has
commercial support and consulting.

For SciPy, I'd replace the part after the last comma with "is free and
open-source, supports cloud computing, and has options for commercial
user support and consulting."  One could add to the list of general
features, such as symbolic manipulation, parallel processing, etc.,
but it's already getting long.

For SciPy, some of this, of course, is not yet true, which is the
point of the current thread.

Another way of looking at it:
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David Cournapeau | 1 Aug 2009 18:21
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Re: [SciPy-User] SciPy Foundation

Hi Joe,

On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 2:06 AM, Joe Harrington<jh <at> physics.ucf.edu> wrote:

>
> I define success as popular adoption in preference to commercial
> packages.  I believe in vote-with-your-feet: this goal will not be
> reached until all aspects of the package and its presentation to the
> world exceed those of our commercial competition.  Scipy is now a
> grass roots effort, but that takes it only so far.  Other projects,
> such as OpenOffice and Sage, don't follow this model and do produce
> quality products that compete with commercial offerings, at least on
> open-source platforms.

I am not sure openoffice is a good example, but I share the sentiment
that something is missing in the organization of the community.

I think it is very important to keep in mind that in any open source
project, telling people what to do does not work well. Not everybody
will share the same goals, are interested in scipy in the same way,
etc...  So any structure should help people doing what they want for
scipy's sake, but above all, should not alienate anyone who would have
worked on scipy otherwise. It may just be rhetoric, but saying that
"it would be nice for scipy to have this goal" instead of "we should
do this" matters IMHO.

Some of the things I am missing:
 - no quantifiable feedback from users: if we want to work on a set of
features, we cannot prioritize.  Likewise, we have very little
statistics on usage, platforms, etc... OTOH, this is often hard to
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Joe Harrington | 1 Aug 2009 19:10
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Re: [SciPy-User] SciPy Foundation

[Replying only on scipy-dev, per the original post.]

David wrote:

> I think it is very important to keep in mind that in any open source
> project, telling people what to do does not work well. Not everybody
> will share the same goals, are interested in scipy in the same way,
> etc...  So any structure should help people doing what they want for
> scipy's sake, but above all, should not alienate anyone who would
> have worked on scipy otherwise. It may just be rhetoric, but saying
> that "it would be nice for scipy to have this goal" instead of "we
> should do this" matters IMHO.

I think (hope!) that everyone understands that anything posted here is
a personal opinion and that none of us feels we are in a position to
give orders.  Nobody is boss or supervisor to the whole list.  When I
write, "We need...," of course I am writing "It is my opinion that we
need," etc., but that gets tedious both to write and to read.  Visions
should be bold.

That said, there do need to be goals, standards, etc.  Those do
translate into telling people what to do.  I think the key point is
that it must be the community, not any individual, that does the
telling.  For example, we are engaged in a discussion of a plan I
floated.  The list I posted is "my plan", but already we've added code
to the funding umbrella and no doubt there will be more changes (I
fully expected Robert Kern to flip out about my suggestion to remove
functions from numpy...maybe he didn't read that far...I expect to
lose that one.:-).  I think that once it's the community's plan, we
can say no to contributions that don't fit, that conflict with others,
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Tommy Grav | 1 Aug 2009 19:11
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Re: SciPy Foundation


On Aug 1, 2009, at 12:20 PM, Joe Harrington wrote:

> Dag wrote:
>> I have seen email threads asking
>> what the SciPy goal is, without any clear resolution (?).
>
> For me, SciPy is a replacement for IDL that improves on it in some
> areas.  No more, but no less.

I have been using python, numpy and matplotlib for a few years as part
of my astronomy research. While I find numpy and matplotlib extremely
useful, scipy just don't seem to help me much. I think the problem is  
that
it is very unfocused. To me scipy is not a replacement of IDL, it is a  
python
implementation of Numerical Recipes, but it because of its lack of focus
it has become very chaotic. So far I have only found use for the  
integrate.leastsq
and spatial.KDTree packages from scipy. Packages like pyfits, pyraf,  
AstLib, etc.
take care of the more astronomy related problems. So I would  
personally like to
see scipy become a package that binds the numpy package to the more  
field
specific packages, by providing numerical methods that are broadly  
applicable
in many fields (i.e. least square minimization, KDTree implementation,  
Runga-Kutta
and other type of integration schemes, differential equation solvers
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Dag Sverre Seljebotn | 1 Aug 2009 19:49
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Re: SciPy Foundation

Joe Harrington wrote:
> Dag wrote:
>> I have seen email threads asking
>> what the SciPy goal is, without any clear resolution (?).
>
> For me, SciPy is a replacement for IDL that improves on it in some
> areas.  No more, but no less.  That doesn't say what it *is*, since it
> just begs the question, "what is IDL", but it does identify the space
> I'd like to see SciPy occupy.  It occupies most of the space IDL
> occupied for me now, except for a few crucial areas.  The main one is
> that enough of my colleagues use it that I can exchange codes with
> them.  A code written in an interpreted language that your colleague
> does not use is not useful to them.  If it's not useful to them, then
> the interest in your contribution is that much smaller.  So, my goal
> is to make SciPy (the toolstack, not the package) *to them* be what
> IDL is to them today.  That is a lot more than what IDL is to me,
> since I have more of a knack for computers than most of my colleagues.
> They need a one-touch install, hold-your-hand docs, GUIs, and so
> forth.  They are also less interested in the linguistic improvements
> of Python over IDL.  Or, they are until they really get coding, which
> is long after they make the decision to give it a spin.  This is a
> good thing in a way, since it means that once they try it, they
> *really* like it.  Most current SciPy users, I think, are savvy enough
> about computers that we can work around the shortcomings, but the next
> round of adopters will always be less savvy than the last, on the
> whole, hence the need for better and lower-level docs, professional
> packaging on all platforms, etc.

I really, really want what you seem to want too. BUT, I'll continue my
criticism, in the hope that something may come out of it.
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josef.pktd | 1 Aug 2009 22:10
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Re: nbinom.ppf

On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 11:29 AM, <josef.pktd <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Robert Kern<robert.kern <at> gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 20:11, <josef.pktd <at> gmail.com> wrote:
>>> That's better. It took me a while to understand the logic behind the
>>> way the ceiling error is corrected. The same pattern is also followed
>>> by the other discrete distributions that define a _ppf method. It is
>>> cleaner then the epsilon correction, but takes longer to figure out
>>> what it does.
>>>
>>> To understand the logic more easily and to be DRY, it would be better
>>> to replace the duplication of the _cdf method directly with a call to
>>> self._cdf.
>>> For example, in changeset 4673, Robert, you changed the _cdf method to
>>> use betainc instead of nbdtr, but not the _ppf method. Without the
>>> code duplication, partial corrections could be more easily avoided.
>>>
>>> Is there a reason not to call self._cdf instead?
>>
>> Nope. Go ahead.
>>
>> --
>> Robert Kern
>>
>> "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
>> enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
>> though it had an underlying truth."
>>  -- Umberto Eco
>> _______________________________________________
>> Scipy-dev mailing list
>> Scipy-dev <at> scipy.org
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David Goldsmith | 1 Aug 2009 23:56
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Re: SciPy Foundation


--- On Sat, 8/1/09, Tommy Grav <tgrav <at> mac.com> wrote:

> Making scipy into a tool for science and engineering is in
> my opinion  
> a to broad a
> goal. Making into a set of tools that are useable in many
> fields and  
> thus supporting
> development of field specific packages is in again my
> opinion the way  
> to go. 

Please clarify what you see as the difference between these two - to me, on the surface of it, your goal
statement is no more "focused" nor "self-contained" than Joe's.  Perhaps if you clarify what you see as the
differences, we all may discover that your vision and Joe's actually aren't that far apart.

DG

> It narrows
> the focus and makes the project more self contained.
> 
> Cheers
> Tommy Grav
> + 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
> Associate Researcher  <at>  Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
> Johns Hopkins University
> + 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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