Exactly. This is great, thanks Marten. I agree with pretty much everything in this list.
For my part, a few things immediately popped out at my that I disagree with. ;-) Which does not mean it isn’t a useful exercise, but it does mean we should expect a fair bit of debate. But I do think we should be clear as to what the point is: I think it could be helpful for clarifying for new and long standing users of numpy what the “numpythonic” way to use numpy is. I think this is very closely tied to the duck typing discussion. But for guiding implementations of “numpy-like” libraries, not so much: they are going to implement the features their users need — whether it’s “officially” part of the numpy API is a minor concern. Unless there is an official “Standard”, but it doesn’t sound like anyone has that in mind. I’m also a bit confused as to the scope: is this effort about the python API only? In which case, I’m not sure how it relates to libraries in/for other languages. Or only about those that provide a Python binding? When I first read the topic of this thread, I expected it to be about the C API — it would be nice to clearly define what parts of the C API are considered public and stable. (Though maybe that’s already done — I do get numpy API deprecation warnings at times..) -CHB