[IPython-dev] Roadmap to IPython 1.0 and beyond

Paul Ivanov pi at berkeley.edu
Wed Feb 20 03:23:18 EST 2013


HTML version of this message is up on the website [0]. 

TL;DR summary: Hi! IPython 1.0 coming mid-July 2013. See the
grant [1] which is funding the bulk of the work, as well as our
roadmap [2] for achieving the grant's objectives. 

There's been a lot of excitement on about the grant the IPython
team received from the Sloan Foundation. The easiest way to
communicate the contents of the Sloan grant is to just provide it
in its entirety, which is what we've done with direct links for
html [3] and pdf [4] version).

The interested reader will find a description of changes coming
to IPython over the next two years, as well as the motivation
behind them, and the personnel involved. (For example, the astute
reader of the grant will correctly infer that this email is one
way in which I am filling my responsibility as "community
engagement and evangelism"... GO TEAM!)

Two weeks ago, the bulk of IPython's core contributors had a
series of planning sessions. For three days, Brian, Fernando,
Min, and I met on campus in Berkeley, with Thomas and Matthias
joining in via video teleconference (and Brad, for one of the
days, too).

You can see the full notes from those meetings. [5]

Our primary objective was to outline a plan of what work we want
to accomplish in the next two years (broadly speaking) as well as
to make concrete goals for our next (1.0!) release, which will
land around Bastille Day (July 14th, 2013, for the uninitiated).

It's kind of funny that there's a message from Fernando to
[ipython-user] back in April of 2005 titled "Towards IPython 1.0,
the famous big cleanup". In it [6], Fernando makes a last call
for outstanding critical bugs because he's preparing users for a
transition toward big changes in the IPython code base. Because,
once he makes the first commit and starts working on the cleanup,
he'll have to ignore every request made “until the new shiny
ipython emerges from the process, reborn in a glory which shall
blind the world.” Toward the end of the email, he finishes with:
"I hope the changes will be worth it, and when the dust settles,
we'll have something we can call IPython 1.0"... And eight years
and a few months after that email was sent, we will! :)

What will 1.0 look like? Biggest changes on the user side will be
the integration of nbconvert [7] into IPython proper. But that's just
my summary of it, the interested reader is encouraged to read the
gory details in the roadmap.

that's it from me for now, here are the links

0. http://ipython.org/roadmap-announcement.html
1. http://ipython.org/sloan-grant.html
2. https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/Roadmap:-IPython
3. http://ipython.org/_static/sloangrant/sloan-grant.html
4. http://ipython.org/_static/sloangrant/sloan-grant.pdf
5. https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/Dev:-Meeting-notes,-February-6,-2013
6. http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/ipython-user/2005-April/002648.html
7. https://github.com/ipython/nbconvert

best,
-- 
Paul Ivanov
http://pirsquared.org | GPG/PGP key id: 0x0F3E28F7



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