[Numpy-discussion] The future of ndarray.diagonal()

Konrad Hinsen konrad.hinsen at fastmail.net
Sun Jan 4 23:22:13 EST 2015


On 04/01/15 21:55, Sturla Molden wrote:

> On 03/01/15 20:49, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>
>> OTOH the big problem that motivated his post was that his code is
>> all written against the APIs of the ancient and long-abandoned Numeric
>> project, and he finds the costs of transitioning them to the "new" numpy
>> APIs to be prohibitively expensive, i.e. this big-bang transition broke
>> his code.
>
> Given that a big-bang transition broke his code everywhere, I don't
> really see why he wants more of them.

I am not asking for "big-bang transitions" as such. I am asking for 
breaking changes to go along with a clearly visible and clearly 
announced change in the API name and/or major version.

A change as important as dropping support for an API that has been 
around for 20 years shouldn't happen as one point in the change list 
from version 1.8 to 1.9. It can happen in the transition from "numpy" to 
"numpy2", which ideally should be done in a way that permits users to 
install both "numpy" and "numpy2" in parallel to ease the transition.

There is a tacit convention in computing that "higher" version numbers 
of a package indicate improvements and extensions but not reduction in 
functionality. This convention also underlies most of today's package 
management systems. Major breaking changes violate this tacit convention.

> The question of reproducible research is orthogonal to this, I think.

Indeed. My blog post addresses two distinct issues, whose common point 
is that they relate to the evolution of NumPy.

Konrad.





More information about the NumPy-Discussion mailing list