On 6 November 2017 at 18:50, Stephan Houben stephanh42@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Michel,
That's exactly why I proposed a `pip` function available from the Python prompt. I suppose you could still tell your students to copy/paste the following into their Python interpreter.
def pip(args): import sys import subprocess subprocess.check_call([sys.executable, "-m", "pip"] + args.split()) print("Please restart Python now to use installed or upgraded packages.")
Depending on where and how Python is installed, this may still not work (while I'll grant that Linux users are more likely to already be familiar with the command line than Windows and Mac OS X users, it's still a non-trivial step from there to realising why "sudo pip install" is almost always a bad idea)
I suppose an alternative is to set up jupyterhub
https://jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
and let all your students just access that from a webbrowser.
Yep, and lots of teachers use services like PythonAnywhere, trinket.io, and similar, precisely because the only thing the learners need locally is a web browser. The main downside is that learning that way isn't quite as transferable a skill, since it completely hides the code packaging and distribution step. However, it's a good option when the primary aim is to teach computational skills, and Python is just the vehicle used for that purpose.
Software Carpentry starts out with the Anaconda distribution, as it not only improves the cross-platform UX consistent situation, it also deals with the external binary dependency problem (at least for the core set of packages provided either natively or via conda-forge).
Cheers, Nick.