[SciPy-user] Clarification sought on various Python numerical packages

[David Huard]

Thanks Robert,

I'd like to put this historical note on the wiki. Any objections ?


David

2006/5/3, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com>:
>
> Matthew Webber wrote:
> > I would appreciate it if someone could clarify for me the various Python
> > "numerical" packages.
>
> I'm afraid that both David and Bill are also confused on some points.
>
> In the beginning was Numeric. Unfortunately, Numeric acquired several
> nicknames:
> Numerical Python, Numerical, NumPy. For example, the SourceForge project
> name
> for it is numpy, the old CVS module is Numerical, Konrad Hinsen named his
> package Scientific Python in reference to Numerical Python.
>
> Development on Numeric slowed down several years ago, and people wanted to
> extend it in ways that the then-current codebase did not really allow.
> Furthermore, there was a desire to get Numeric or something like it into
> the
> standard library, and Guido was quite clear that the code was not
> maintainable
> in its state then. The numarray project began as a complete rewrite of
> Numeric
> that, among other things, pushed some of the code up into the Python
> level. This
> gave numarray a lot of flexibility and allowed it to experiment with a
> number of
> alternatives that have proven their usefulness. It also was quite fast for
> very
> large arrays because the people working on it were at the Space Telescope
> Science Institute and were intending to use it for astronomical image
> processing.
>
> Unfortunately, as fast as it was for large arrays, it was too slow for
> small
> arrays. In particular, SciPy codes ran quite a bit slower. Also, the C API
> for
> creating ufuncs was not as convenient as that of Numeric. Consequently, it
> was
> going to be very difficult to convert the SciPy codebase to use numarray.
> This
> split fractured the community quite a bit: some people wrote code only for
> numarray, seeing it as the next Numeric; some people wrote code for
> Numeric,
> because they needed SciPy.
>
> Travis Oliphant wanted to reunify the community around a single array
> package.
> He refactored Numeric's code to make it more maintainable (although
> probably not
> enough to get the whole thing into the standard library, more on that
> later) and
> flexible enough to implement the novel features of numarray. He named this
> project "scipy core" and intended to use the package name "scipy". The
> rest of
> SciPy would simply add more modules to core SciPy package. Eventually, it
> became
> clear that people were mistakenly thinking that Numeric had been subsumed
> into
> SciPy and that they would have to install the whole of SciPy just to get
> an
> array object.
>
> We had a long discussion about what to name the package, and the winner
> was numerix!
>
> Unfortunately, that name is trademarked by a company that does DSP. In
> order to
> avoid trademark infringement by ourselves and by our users, we needed
> another
> name. We picked numpy.
>
> Moral: Don't let your software project acquire nicknames!
>
> --
> 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
>
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