[Numpy-discussion] What Requires C and what is just python

[Hans-Martin v. Gaudecker]

>>>> So, in addition to my computer science work, I'm a PhD student in econ. Right now, the class is using GAUSS for almost everything. This sort of pisses me off because it means people are building libraries of code that become valueless when they graduate (because right now we get GAUSS licenses for free, but it is absurdly expensive later) -- particularly when this is the only language they know.

That's precisely the reason we just switched our PhD computational econometrics course from GAUSS to NumPy/SciPy/statsmodels/matplotlib :-) Although some of my colleagues are not completely convinced yet...

> this looks interesting on this topic:
> 
> http://www.vwl.uni-mannheim.de/gaudecker/teaching.htm
> 
> Josef

Well, the only closely related thing there are the 'installation instructions', other than that it's really an adaption of http://software-carpentry.org/ for economists.

>>>> So, I had this idea of building some command line tools to do the same things using the most basic pieces of NumPy (arrays, dot products, transpose and inverse -- that's it). And it is going great. My problem however is that I'd like to be able to share these tools but I know I'm opening up a big can of worms where I have to go around building numpy on 75 peoples computers. 

I don't think that will be an issue -- most of my students (in either the course Josef linked to above or the econometrics one) had not used anything else than Stata or Matlab before, let alone installed something on their own. Nobody reported any problems when following the above-mentioned guide. The installers work great now, only thing missing currently is a matplotlib installer on 64-bit MacOS.

My 2 cents.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin