SciPy '04 BoF: Making Python Attractive to General Scientists
Making Python Attractive to General Scientists BoF session at SciPy '04 Joe Harrington, Cornell Perry Greenfield, STScI 1. Intro: Why don't more people use Python for scientific analysis? 10 min - typical new user experience - which cohort of new users is it most advantageous to attract? - what's needed before they'll try it - what they'll need to stay - impact of competitors 2. What needs to be done? 10 min - start with draft list - brief open discussion to add/change list 3. Getting people to do it. 10 min - (Note that, while we'd like people to get involved directly, we are realistic in knowing that many are already doing what they can. We're looking for ideas on getting more people in the wider community interested.) - how big are the pieces? - what kind of people should do each item: e.g., coders vs. writers - how to find and involve those people - find people to volunteer to hand-hold some doc writers through learning 4. Approaches to making it easier/faster. 15 min - focus on documenting just a core subset? - can we afford to reduce optimization to ease maintenance, early on? - broadening the community through outreach - hiring writers & packagers 5. How to proceed. 15 min - discussion of specific plans Our short-term goal is to make Python attractive enough for ordinary, non-developer scientists to try it out, particularly those on platforms not well-supported by the current distribution systems. The long-term goals are to extend the community, and to draw from the extended community more and better documentation and application software. While we do have ideas about where we think we need to go, the purpose of this BoF is to see whether the community agrees that accessibility is an important issue, and if so what is needed to achieve it. Please join us for a BoF on Thursday night. Thanks, --jh-- Joe Harrington 326 Space Sciences Building Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853-6801 (607) 254-8960 office (607) 255-9002 fax jh@oobleck.astro.cornell.edu
On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Joe Harrington wrote:
Making Python Attractive to General Scientists BoF session at SciPy '04
Joe Harrington, Cornell Perry Greenfield, STScI
[...]
Please join us for a BoF on Thursday night.
Hi, as I won't be able to come to SciPy '04, I would like to add a few remarks on this: python in general - syntax checker which does not run the code Documentation: I think that for a package like Numeric/SciPy the documentation should also allow for mathematical formulae. I think that ReSt, http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html would a good candidate. There is an experimental latex preprocessor, http://docutils.sourceforge.net/sandbox/cben/rolehack/README.html Maybe MathMl would be another option? Using a new command like `ghelp` a graphical output window could display all this nicely. More generally, a good help browser would be great (documancer, http://documancer.sourceforge.net/ looks most promising and I use it a lot already now!) In particular, for scientific use the display of LaTeX formulae (or MathML ?) would be necessary. ((documancer uses wxMozilla, so it should be possible to do that). The above proposed `ghelp` could actually invoke documancer to display the help entry.)) The maple/mathematica or matlab help seem to be pretty good examples for something like this. Specifically I think that - more extensive documentation is needed, IMHO. In particular, each command should have at _least_ one example. Moreover, technical/algorithmical background information (with formulae) would be helpful. - There should be an easy way for user-contributed documentation and code-snippets (which will/could be integrated into scipy in an automatic (?) way) ((When trying out a command I tend to write a short example to test whether I understood the description correctly. If many users would contribute their mini-examples using a well-defined and simple procedure that could accumulate quite quickly ...)) Best, Arnd P.S.: and of course the `SciPyWorkBench', http://www.scipy.net/pipermail/ipython-user/2004-May/000298.html might be one important thing to many users.
participants (2)
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Arnd Baecker -
Joe Harrington