On Thu, 30 Oct 2014 01:09:45 +1000, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
(Paul Moore already covered most of this, but I'll go into a bit more detail in a couple of areas)
On 29 October 2014 00:46, Tony Kelman <kelman@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Stephen J. Turnbull:
It should be evident by now that our belief is that the large majority of Windows users is well-served by the current model
This is not the case at all in the scientific community. NumPy and SciPy put in a lot of extra work to come up with something that is compatible with the MSVC build of CPython because they have to, not because they're "happy to" jump through the necessary hoops.
Lots of folks are happy with POSIX emulation layers on Windows, as they're OK with "basically works" rather than "works like any other native application". "Basically works" isn't sufficient for many Python-on-Windows use cases though, so the core ABI is a platform native one, rather than a POSIX emulation.
Since some of the context here is scientific use of Python, it might be a useful bit of perspective to know that, while there are doubtless many scientists using windows and using the windows native interfaces happily, the Software Carpentry bootcamps that aim to give scientists the basic framework for making better use of computers and software and programming have as one foundation the bash shell, taught on Windows via git-bash. That is, the common toolset being taught to scientists (by Software Carpentry) is the posix one, even on Windows. --David