[SciPy-user] Polynomial interpolation

[Gael Varoquaux]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 01:24:46PM -0500, Robert Kern wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Gael Varoquaux
> <gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org> wrote:
> >  I am not suggesting to make a bad design choice, or to go
> >  out of our way, I just want a two liner helper function.

> I'm afraid that *is* widely recognized as a bad design choice.

I don't agree. We are not changing the design of scipy. Users are
welcomed not to use this procedural interface if they want. The choice is
not ours.

Functional code severely confuses beginners. In a French lab, in
experimental physics, but also in biology and chemistry, bosses don't
code, only PhD students do (I have heard a famous guy, working in
computational physics, call his students "human-computer interfaces").
These PhD students stay in the lab between 3 and 4 years (yes a PhD is
short in France, that's because studies before the PhD are long). Thus
they spend a good fraction of their time being beginners. Some pick up
quickly, others have more difficulties. Some people don't need much out
of a computer. Please, give them interfaces that don't confuse them.

I was once told that Matlab was superior to Python because it did not
have confusing objects like lists, tuples, and arrays. Everything was an
array. That's not true, by the way, but it reflects that some people are
happy when they can do everything in a simple way, and not worry about
the right way of doing things.

Gaël