[IPython-dev] Integrating pandas into pylab

Aaron Meurer asmeurer at gmail.com
Thu Oct 27 12:28:31 EDT 2011


On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Satrajit Ghosh <satra at mit.edu> wrote:
> hi brian,
> thanks for the clarification. yes we are talking of two different levels of
> new users.
>>
>> In summary, there are three mostly-orthogonal issues:
>>
>> 1) The need for the flat namespace for truly beginning users.
>> 2) The need to consolidate/organize the existing messy and overlapping
>> namespaces of numpy/scipy/matplotlib.
>> 3) The need for lookfor type functionality for all users.
>>
>> It is possible that 1 and 2 could be solved in a single package.
>> There could be well organized io, linalg, algo, etc submodules and an
>> "all" module that imports everything for users that need/want it.
>
> i like this approach and i agree with thomas that most of 3) could be solved
> via documentation. we might just want to be clever about it and have it in
> the docstring+code :)
> cheers,
> satra

I think IPython could help on this front.  Instead of relying on good
"See Also" sections in docstrings (though those are important too), it
would be useful to have an IPython magic that searched the docstring
of every name in the present namespace (pardon me if this already
exists, I didn't find anything like it in %magic).

That way, it would be easy for users to just import everything from
pylab (or whatever), and try to find functions related to whatever
functionality they are interested in.  This would be somewhat of an
equivalent of the built-in help for a GUI program like Matlab or R
GUI.  And of course, the GUI versions of IPython could (and should)
have more GUI oriented versions of this.

Aaron Meurer



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