[IPython-dev] [ANN] IPython 1.0 is finally released, nearly 12 years in the making!

Sat Aug 10 00:03:02 EDT 2013

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 8:10 PM, Aaron Meurer <asmeurer at gmail.com> wrote:

> I noticed that git says "2.0.0-dev". Are you being overly optimistic,
> or did you revert your policy of only supporting one version at a
> time?
>

I'm not sure what you mean.  We are certainly planning to make
backward-incompatible changes to be released in the Fall, which suggests a
new major version.  We are trying out a roughly six month major release
cycle (2.0 in Winter, 3.0 next Summer).  We will backport fixes to 1.0 as
long as it is tenable (1.x branch already has a few fixes), which may not
be past Winter.

-MinRK

>
> Aaron Meurer
>
> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 7:35 PM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I am incredibly thrilled, on behalf of the amazing IPython Dev Team,
> > to announce the official release of IPython 1.0 today, an effort
> > nearly 12 years in the making.  The previous version (0.13) was
> > released on June 30, 2012, and in this development cycle we had:
> >
> > ~12 months of work.
> > ~700 pull requests merged.
> > ~600 issues closed (non-pull requests).
> > contributions from ~150 authors.
> > ~4000 commits.
> >
> >
> > # A little context
> >
> > What does "1.0" mean for IPython? Obviously IPython has been a staple
> > of the scientific Python community for years, and we've made every
> > effort to make it a robust and production ready tool for a long time,
> > so what exactly do we mean by tagging this particular release as 1.0?
> > Basically, we feel that the core design of IPython, and the scope of
> > the project, is where we want it to be.
> >
> > What we have today is what we consider a reasonably complete, design-
> > and scope-wise, IPython 1.0: an architecture for interactive
> > computing, that can drive kernels in a number of ways using a
> > well-defined protocol, and rich and powerful clients that let users
> > control those kernels effectively. Our different clients serve
> > different needs, with the old workhorse of the terminal still being
> > very useful, but much of our current development energy going into the
> > Notebook, obviously.  The Notebook enables interactive exploration to
> > become Literate Computing, bridging the gaps from individual work to
> > collaboration and publication, all with an open file format that is a
> > direct record of the underlying communication protocol.
> >
> > There are obviously plenty of open issues (many of them very
> > important) that need fixing, and large and ambitious new lines of
> > development for the years to come.  But the work of the last four
> > years, since the summer of 2009 when Brian Granger was able to devote
> > a summer (thanks to funding from the NiPy project - nipy.org) to
> > refactoring the old IPython core code, finally opened up or
> > infrastructure for real innovation. By disentangling what was a useful
> > but impenetrable codebase, it became possible for us to start building
> > a flexible, modern system for interactive computing that abstracted
> > the old REPL model into a generic protocol that kernels could use to
> > talk to clients. This led at first to the creation of the Qt console,
> > and then to the Notebook and out-of-process terminal client.  It also
> > allowed us to (finally!) unify our parallel computing machinery with
> > the rest of the interactive system, which Min Ragan-Kelley pulled off
> > in a development tour de force that involved rewriting in a few weeks
> > a huge and complex Twisted-based system.
> >
> > We are very happy with how the Notebook work has turned out, and it
> > seems the entire community agrees with us, as the uptake has been
> > phenomenal.  Back from the very first "IPython 0.0.1" that I started
> > in 2001:
> >
> > https://gist.github.com/fperez/1579699
> >
> > there were already hints of tools like Mathematica: it was my everyday
> > workhorse as a theoretical physicist and I found its Notebook
> > environment invaluable. But as a grad student trying out "just an
> > afternoon hack" (IPython was my very first Python program as I was
> > learning the language), I didn't have the resources, skills or vision
> > to attempt building an entire notebook system, and to be honest the
> > tools of the day would have made that enterprise a miserable one.  But
> > those ideas were always driving our efforts, and as IPython started
> > becoming a project with a team, we made multiple attempts to get a
> > good Notebook built around IPython.  Those interested can read an old
> > blog post of mine with the history
> > (http://blog.fperez.org/2012/01/ipython-notebook-historical.html).
> > The short story is that in 2011, on our sixth attempt, Brian was again
> > able to devote a focused summer into using our client-server
> > architecture and, with the stack of the modern web (Javascript, CSS,
> > websockets, Tornado, ...), finally build a robust system for Literate
> > Computing across programming languages.
> >
> > Today, thanks to the generous support and vision of Josh Greenberg at
> > the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we are working very hard on building
> > the notebook infrastructure, and this release contains major advances
> > on that front.  We have high hopes for what we'll do next; as a
> > glimpse of the future that this enables, now there is a native Julia
> > kernel that speaks to our clients, notebook included:
> > https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl.
> >
> >
> > # Team
> >
> > I can't stress enough how impressed I am with the work people are
> > doing in IPython, and what a privilege it is to work with colleagues
> > like these.  Brian Granger and Min Ragan-Kelley joined IPython around
> > 2005, initially working on the parallel machinery, but since ~ 2009
> > they have become the heart of the project. Today Min is our top
> > committer and knows our codebase better than anyone else, and I can't
> > imagine better partners for an effort like this.
> >
> > And from regulars in our core team like Thomas Kluyver, Matthias
> > Bussonnier, Brad Froehle and Paul Ivanov to newcomers like Jonathan
> > Frederic and Zach Sailer, in addition to the many more whose names are
> > in our logs, we have a crazy amount of energy being poured into
> > IPython.  I hope we'll continue to harness it productively!
> >
> > The full list of contributors to this release can be seen here:
> >
> > http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/rel-1.0.0/whatsnew/github-stats-1.0.html
> >
> >
> > # Release highlights
> >
> > * nbconvert: this is the major piece of new functionality in this
> > cycle, and was an explicit part of our roadmap
> > (https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/Roadmap:-IPython). nbconvert
> > is now an IPython subcommand to convert notebooks into other formats
> > such as HTML or LaTeX, but more importantly, it's a very flexible
> > system that lets you write custom templates to generate new output
> > with arbitrary control over the formatting and transformations that
> > are applied to the input.
> >
> > We want to stress that despite the fact that a huge amount of work
> > went into nbconvert, this should be considered a *tech preview*
> > release. We've come to realize how complex this problem is, and while
> > we'll make every effort to keep the high-level command-line syntax and
> > APIs as stable as possible, it is quite likely that the internals will
> > continue to evolve, possibly in backwards-incompatible ways.  So if
> > you start building services and libraries that make heavy use of the
> > nbconvert internals, please be prepared for some turmoil in the months
> > to come, and ping us on the dev list with questions or concerns.
> >
> > * Notebook improvements: there has been a ton of polish work in the
> > notebook at many levels, though the file format remains unchanged from
> > 0.13, so you shouldn't have any problems sharing notebooks with
> > colleagues still using 0.13.
> >
> >   - Autosave: probably the most oft-requested feature, the notebook
> > server now autosaves your files!  You can still hit Ctrl-S to force a
> > manual save (which also creates a special 'checkpoint' you can come
> > back to).
> >
> >   - The notebook supports raw_input(), and thus also %debug. This was
> > probably the main deficiency of the notebook as a client compared to
> > the terminal/qtconsole, and it has been finally fixed.
> >
> >   - Add %%html, %%svg, %%javascript, and %%latex cell magics for
> > writing raw output in notebook cells.
> >   - Fix an issue parsing LaTeX in markdown cells, which required users
> > to type \\\, instead of \\.
> >   -Images support width and height metadata, and thereby 2x scaling
> > (retina support).
> >   - %%file has been renamed %%writefile (%%file) is deprecated.
> >
> > * The input transofrmation code has been updated and rationalized.
> > This is a somewhat specialized part of IPython, but of importance to
> > projects that build upon it for custom environments, like Sympy and
> > Sage.
> >
> > Our full release notes are here:
> >
> > http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/rel-1.0.0/whatsnew/version1.0.html
> >
> > and the gory details are here:
> >
> > http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/rel-1.0.0/whatsnew/github-stats-1.0.html
> >
> >
> > # Installation
> >
> > Installation links and instructions are at:
> http://ipython.org/install.html
> > And IPython is also on PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ipython
> >
> >
> > # Requirements
> >
> > IPython 1.0 requires Python ≥ 2.6.5 or ≥ 3.2.1. It does not support
> > Python 3.0, 3.1, or 2.5.
> >
> >
> > # Acknowledgments
> >
> > Last but not least, we'd like to acknowledge the generous support of
> > those who make it possible for us to spend our time working on
> > IPython.  In particular, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today lets us
> > have a solid team working full-time on the project, and without the
> > support of Enthought Inc at multiple points in our history, we
> > wouldn't be where we are today.
> >
> > The full list of our support is here:
> >
> > http://ipython.org/index.html#support
> >
> >
> > Thanks to everyone! Please enjoy IPython 1.0, and report all bugs as
> usual!
> >
> > Fernando, on behalf of the IPython Dev Team.
> >
> > --
> > Fernando Perez (@fperez_org; http://fperez.org)
> > fperez.net-at-gmail: mailing lists only (I ignore this when swamped!)
> > fernando.perez-at-berkeley: contact me here for any direct mail
> > --
> > Fernando Perez (@fperez_org; http://fperez.org)
> > fperez.net-at-gmail: mailing lists only (I ignore this when swamped!)
> > fernando.perez-at-berkeley: contact me here for any direct mail
> > _______________________________________________
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