On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 4:50 PM, Matti Picus <matti.picus@gmail.com> wrote:

At the recent NumPy sprint at BIDS (thanks to those who made the trip) we spent some time brainstorming about a roadmap for NumPy, in the spirit of similar work that was done for Jupyter. The idea is that a document with wide community acceptance can guide the work of the full-time developer(s), and be a source of ideas for expanding development efforts.

I put the document up at https://github.com/numpy/numpy/wiki/NumPy-Roadmap, and hope to discuss it at a BOF session during SciPy in the middle of July in Austin.

Thanks for writing that up!

Eventually it could become a NEP or formalized in another way.

A NEP doesn't sound quite right, but moving from wiki to somewhere more formal and with more control over the contents (e.g. numpy.org or in the docs) would be useful. A roadmap could/should also include things like required effort, funding and knowledge/people required.

A couple of comments on the content:

- a mention of stability or backwards compatibility goals under philosophy would be useful

- the "Could potentially be split out into separate packages..." should be removed I think - the maskedarray one was already rejected, and the rest are similarly unhelpful.

- "internal refactorings": MaskedArray yes, but the other ones no. numpy.distutils and f2py are very hard to test, a big refactor pretty much guarantees breakage. there's also not much need for refactoring, because those things are not coupled to the numpy.core internals. numpy.financial is simply uninteresting - we wish it wasn't there but it is, so now it simply stays where it is.

- One item that I think is missing under "New functionality" is runtime switching of backend for numpy.linalg (IIRC discussed on this list before) and numpy.random (MKL devs are interested in this).

Cheers,

Ralf