On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Stéfan van der Walt <stefan@sun.ac.za>wrote:

Hi everyone,

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 4:15 PM, Josh Warner <silvertrumpet999@gmail.com> wrote:

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Should function-for-function feature parity, even where this is not particularly useful, be a goal? That's what I get from this table.

[...]

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As a reformed Matlab user, I personally prefer the general Python way

which

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is not "everything and the kitchen sink" in one massive package, but more pick-and-choose from a diverse toolkit for the problem(s) at hand. But that's just me.

Thanks for your thoughts, Josh, I agree with the points you make.

In my recent talk at EuroSciPy, I mentioned that the MATLAB compatibility table was probably a mistake on my part. At that time, I was trying to find a way forward with skimage that would help us to grow, and providing an easy route of transitioning for users from other platforms seemed like a worthwhile goal.

Looking back, especially at my experience with Octave, I realize that trying to imitate another package squashes much innovation and does not lead to well-designed or Pythonic solutions. In the mean time, the core team has grown, with a very active role being played by excellent coders such as Tony, Johannes, Andreas, and others, so I feel much less pressured to continue along that path.

I think the compatibility table could still be useful as a list of "pointers", but unless someone updates it soon, we should think about removing it. That role can also be played by the user guide (unfortunately, one of our weak points, which I'd love to address).

Stéfan

I agree: we probably don't want to match Matlab function-for-function. Nevertheless, it'd be nice to have some of the functions on the coverage table. Just out of curiosity: Are there any functions on that list that people are really yearning for? That's directed particularly at *users* of scikits-image, rather than the core developers. I'm not promising I (or anyone else) would implemented it, but it'd be nice to get a sense of what's missing from some people outside of the handful that regularly comment on the list. On a related note: I was thinking of removing the tasks from the contribution page: http://scikits-image.org/docs/dev/contribute.html And adding those tasks to a wiki page on github. Thoughts? -Tony