2008/7/31 Andrew Dalke
The user base for numpy might be .. 10,000 people? 100,000 people? Let's go with the latter, and assume that with command-line scripts, CGI scripts, and the other programs that people write in order to help do research means that numpy is started on average 10 times a day.
100,000 people * 10 times / day * 0.1 seconds per startup = almost 28 people-hours spent each day waiting for numpy to start.
I don't buy that argument. No single person is agile enough to do anything useful in the half a second or so it takes to start up NumPy. No one is *waiting* for NumPy to start. Just by answering this e-mail I could have (and maybe should have) started NumPy three hundred and sixty times. I don't want to argue about this, though. Write the patches, file a ticket, and hopefully someone will deem them important enough to apply them. Stéfan