sympy: what's wrong with this picture?

[Robert Kern]

Mensanator wrote:
> On Mar 3, 4:08 pm, Robert Kern <robert.k... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Mensanator wrote:
>>> On Mar 3, 2:49 pm, Carl Banks <pavlovevide... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> It's just a bug--probably sympy is messing with the internals of the
>>>> random number generator.  It would be a simple fix.  Instead of
>>>> b****ing about it, file a bug report.  
>>> I did.
>>>> Or better yet, submit a patch.
>>> I would if I knew what the problem was.
>> Did you even try to figure it out? It took me all of 5 minutes to find the mistake.
> 
> Could I trouble you to share? Then I could continue my testing.

I posted the patch on the bug tracker:

   http://code.google.com/p/sympy/issues/detail?id=729

>>> I posted it here because someone recommended it.
>>> I'm simply un-recommending it.
>> It was a mistake, an easily remedied mistake,
> 
> But I didn't know that (and still don't).
> 
>> not a big unchangeable design decision.
> 
> I didn't know that either. For all I know, I might have to
> wait for the next version, and who knows when that will be?

The point is that you didn't try to figure it out. And you assumed the worst 
rather than giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. You didn't even wait to get 
a response from the package maintainer about how serious the issue was before 
you came here to un-recommend it.

All software has bugs.

Good software has bugs.

Finding a single bug in a package is not sufficient cause to warn people away as 
if it had the plague.

>> If you want to recommend against sympy as a package, there is a larger
>> burden of proof that you have yet to meet.
> 
> What kind of burden of proof must one have to recommend it in the
> first place?

Significantly less. "It was useful to me," is sufficient.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco