[Numpy-discussion] Fixing issue of future opaqueness of ndarray this summer

Travis Oliphant travis at continuum.io
Sat May 12 23:24:30 EDT 2012


On May 12, 2012, at 9:39 PM, Matthew Brett wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 7:24 PM, Travis Oliphant <travis at continuum.io> wrote:
>> 
>> On May 12, 2012, at 9:01 PM, Matthew Brett wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 5:30 PM, Travis Oliphant <travis at continuum.io> wrote:
>>>> Your thoughts are definitely the future.   We are currently building such a thing.   We would like it to be open source.    We are currently preparing a proposal to DARPA as part of their XDATA proposal in order to help fund this.    Email me offlist if you would like to be a part of this proposal.    You don't have to be a U.S. citizen to participate in this.
>>> 
>>> What if this work that you are doing now is not open-source?  What
>>> relationship will it have to numpy?
>> 
>> Anything DARPA funds will be open source if we are lucky enough to get them to support it our vision.   I'm not sure the exact relationship to current NumPy at this point.    That's why I suggested the need to discuss this on a different venue than this list.    But, this is just me personally interested in something at this point.
>> 
>>> 
>>> It's difficult to have a productive discussion on the list if the main
>>> work is going on elsewhere, and we don't know what it is.
>> 
>> I'm not sure how to make sense of this statement.    The *main* work of *NumPy* is happening on this list.   Nothing should be construed in what I have said to indicate otherwise.   My statement that "we are currently building such a thing" obviously does not apply to NumPy.
>> 
>> Of course work on other things might happen elsewhere and in other ways.    At this point, all contributors to NumPy also work on other things as far as I know.
> 
> In your email above you said "Your thoughts are definitely the future.
>   We are currently building such a thing.   We would like it to be
> open source."  I assume you meant, the future of numpy.  Did you mean
> something else?  Will there be a 'numpy-pro'? If so, how would that
> relate to the future of numpy?
> 

I think I've clarified that I meant something else in that context. 

Any statement about any rumored "NumPy-Pro" is unrelated and completely off-topic (and inappropriate to discuss on this list).  

<off-topic>
Of course there could be such a thing.   Several people have produced things like that before including Enthought (with it's MKL-linked NumPy) and Interactive SuperComputing (starp).  I think it would be great for NumPy if there were a lot of such offerings. 

My preference for such proprietary products is that they eventually become open source which should be pretty clear to anyone paying attention to the way I sold my book  "Guide to NumPy" --- which I might add is currently freely available and became a large primary source for the NumPy Documentation project that Joe Harrington spearheaded.   
</off topic>

But such discussions are really not appropriate for this list.   I would really hope that we can keep the NumPy discussion list on topic to NumPy. Obviously there will be the occasional  "announcement" that describe related but extra-list topics (like Dag posts about Cython and others post about SymPy or SciPy or NumFOCUS, or, conferences, or whatever).  But they should not really create threads of discussion.    

A great place for such general discussions (and perhaps discussions about "governance" or "process") is probably a NumFOCUS mailing list.  NumFOCUS is trying to promote the Open Source tools generally and is in very early stages of organization with the by-laws not even written yet.    I suspect that the board of NumFOCUS would be excited for people to get involved and help organize and participate in forums and mailings lists that discuss how to help the open source scientific stack for Python progress. 

The best way to get involved there is to go to www.numfocus.org and email info at numfocus.org 

Best, 

-Travis





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