[IPython-dev] Great coding everyone!

[Fernando Perez]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll second that - thanks everyone who's contributed. Keep up the good
> work - it's great to see everything evolving so quickly. We're trying
> to keep reviewing and merging pull requests, but if you feel like
> we've overlooked yours, please do remind us about it.

And I'll third it... I have to say: right now I'm starting to cower in
terror every time I'm away from a computer for a few hours b/c of the
inbox explosion of PRs, emails and discussion, but as Brian said,
that's a great problem to have :)

It's really a thrill to see this happen, and to see what started as
'just an afternoon hack' I did really just for myself (partly to learn
python, as IPython was the first Python program I ever wrote, and at
this clip it's going to be my last too :), grow into such a dynamic
project.  The time and energy that everyone puts into it is something
I personally *really* appreciate, and I only hope more of you will
choose to join us.  The project is getting more cleanly structured by
the day, with more separation between its components that make it
easier to work on only one problem without having to understand the
whole monster (as it used to be).  It also is growing in size which
does come with its own challenges, but I do think that we've made good
progress on having a sustainable architecture.  So jump in!

> This also reminds me: Fernando, do you have the scripts for that graph
> you generated, showing change volume by committer for several
> scientific Python projects? I remember the graph from Euroscipy last
> year, illustrating that most projects were reliant on a couple of
> contributors doing nearly all the work. It would be interesting to
> rerun that and see how it's changed.

Yup, coincidentally I'd cleaned it up a few days ago b/c Gael asked me
for it on the sklearn list...  I thought about putting it in as a
notebook example in master, but I'm not sure it's general enough to
warrant that, so here it goes for now; we can later decide if we want
it in:

https://gist.github.com/cbac490896e968839555

Incidentally, it took me quite a while to track down why the data
collection wasn't working, until I think I was able to pin it on a git
shortlog bug that's only apparent when run in a process like our zmq
kernels that lack a tty.  Our pexpect-based ip.system() call saved the
day in the end, where no amount of twisting and turning with any of
popen*, subprocess or os.system would make git produce *any* output.
I thought I was going positively insane...

Cheers,

f