On 4/29/07, Benjamin Thyreau <benjamin@decideur.info> wrote:
Le Samedi 28 Avril 2007 20:03, Simon Berube a écrit:
(...) On the other hand, if you are more interested in small projects where speed of development is more important than long term sustainability of the code Matlab is probably better. This is usually the case in research environment, at least until you figure out exactly what you want to do, then switch to python.
I hope this help, (...)
I guess the point of the question was, in what way should numpy/scipy be improved in order to get the same usability at those cases, according to you ? It's not as obvious as you make it sound, and there also are for sure some advantages in the ipython/scipy stack over matlab's prompt, usability-wise. Any experiences which helps in improving it is thus useful
I like ipython's post-fix ? help. I was back in Matlab a couple of days ago and that's one of the few things I missed about my Numpy setup. I often find I'm typing a command and then I realize I don't recall what the arguments are so then I can just type one extra '?' to get the help. Of course even better would be if ipython were in a GUI, and docstrings could just be proactively prefectched and displayed in another pane while I type, or argument lists could be popped up like in PyCrust. Sadly, other than that I can't think of a whole lot about the numpy environment that I like better than the Matlab environment. (just talking about the environment here -- not the language). Matlab's debugger is very nicely integrated with the prompt, and plots just work, always, and are fast without having to think about ion/ioff stuff or show(). Never need any prayers to the god of GUI event loops to keep plots from freezing things up with Matlab. It's also refreshing to just be able to type "zeros" and "rand" and not have to worry about namespace prefixes. On the other hand I think I yelled a profanity out loud when Matlab gave me the "can't define functions in a script" error. I'd completely forgotten that particular bit of Matlab stupidity. There are probably ways to make the numpy environment more like the above. But there needs to be a 'button' that sets everything up like that or most people just won't find it. For instance maybe ipython could install a "Numpy Interactive" link that uses the -pylab flag and also pulls the numpy namespace into the global one. For debugger integration, is there any way to set up ipython so that on errors it will pop up a GUI debugger that shows the line of source code where the error occured and let you set break points? --bb