[Numpy-discussion] NEP 31 — Context-local and global overrides of the NumPy API

[Ralf Gommers]

On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 1:32 AM Hameer Abbasi <einstein.edison at gmail.com>
wrote:

> That's a lot of very good questions! Let me see if I can answer them
> one-by-one.
>
> On 06.09.19 09:49, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>
> But even that could be accomplished by just
> putting something in the docs. And adding the alias has substantial
> risks: it makes unumpy tied to the numpy release cycle and
> compatibility rules, and it means that we're committing to maintaining
> unumpy ~forever even if Hameer or Quansight move onto other things.
> That seems like a lot to take on for such vague benefits?
>
> I can assure you Travis has had the goal of "replatforming SciPy" from as
> far back as I met him, he's spawned quite a few efforts in that direction
> along with others from Quansight (and they've led to nice projects).
> Quansight, as I see it, is unlikely to abandon something like this if it
> becomes successful (and acceptance of this NEP will be a huge success
> story).
>

Let me address this separately, since it's not really a technical concern.

First, this is not what we say for other contributions. E.g. we didn't say
no to Pocketfft because Martin Reineck may move on, or __array_function__
because Stephan may get other interests at some point, or a whole new
numpy.random, etc.

Second, this is not about Quansight. At Quansight Labs we've been able to
create time for Hameer to build this, and me and others to contribute -
which is very nice, but the two are not tied inextricably together. In the
end it's still individuals submitting this NEP. I have been a NumPy dev for
~10 years before joining Quansight, and my future NumPy contributions are
not dependent on staying at Quansight (not that I plan to go anywhere!).
I'm guessing the same is true for others.

Third, unumpy is a fairly thin layer over uarray, which already has another
user in SciPy.

Cheers,
Ralf
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