[Chicago] MIT Python course and pylab installation.

Kyler Brown kylerjbrown at gmail.com
Tue Mar 14 01:10:22 EDT 2017


Hi Douglas,

There's a nice entry in the FAQ here: http://matplotlib.org/faq/usag
e_faq.html#matplotlib-pyplot-and-pylab-how-are-they-related

My understanding is that pylab isn't a dependency, but a convenience
package that imports numpy and pyplot functions into the main namespace. I
think pylab was important when the scientific python community was young
and most new users were coming from Matlab. Now it's just cruft.

In general python packages can install dependencies. For example, the
date-parsing package 'arrow' requires the package 'dateutil'. Here's the
line in arrow's setup.py specifying that dependency:
https://github.com/crsmithdev/arrow/blob/master/setup.py#L40 so if you `pip
install arrow` you end up with dateutil as well.

You might be interested in exploring dependencies with this tool:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pipdeptree

Cheers!
Kyler

On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 11:05 PM, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:

> Hello to all Pythonistas in the Chicago area.
>
> I just completed the first of two MIT online courses in Python, and I was
> very impressed with the quality of this course.  My only criticism is that
> it seemed that a little too much time was given at the beginning of the
> course for assignments, and by the end of the course not enough time was
> given for the completion of programming assignments, exercises, etc, but of
> course this is very often the case in many courses, whether they are online
> or in a classroom.  But in general I thought this course was really good.
> The video lectures were fantastic, the problem sets were highly instructive
> and thought provoking, and I learned a lot about Python and programming in
> general.  Excellent course.  I highly recommend it to anyone who is just
> starting out with Python, and even experienced Python programmers might
> benefit from a course such as this one.  The discussion forum was also
> pretty good, although I didn't really take advantage of it very much.
>
> On a different topic.... I just got done installing Python3.6 on my Linux
> machine using *./configure*, then *make*, and then *sudo make install*.
> It worked great, no problems.  Then I used *pip3.6* to install the
> following packages: *numpy*, *scipy* and also *matplotlib*.  What's
> rather curious to me is that the *pylab* package also got installed!  But
> I didn't use pip to install that package.  I think it just "piggy backed
> along" when I installed matplotlib.  Is that normal behavior?  Can
> explicitly requested packages implicitly request other packages when those
> packages serve as dependencies?  *I'm guessing that pylab is a dependency
> for matplotlib*, hence when I requested matplotlib, pip had to implicitly
> request the installation of pylab as well, but here I'm just guessing.  My
> installation "appears to be" pretty good, but.... I'm not extremely
> experienced with installing stuff on Linux so I thought it might be a good
> idea to get some advice from the Python pros out there.
>
> Thanks in advance for the constructive feedback and I pray that everyone
> has a wonderful, peaceful and productive week.
>
> Best,
>
> Douglas Lewit
>
>
>
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>
>
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