[Numpy-discussion] Newbie Question, Probability

[Alan G Isaac]

A Dijous 21 Desembre 2006 05:59, A. M. Archibald escrigué: 
> It seems to me that numpy should include only tools for 
> basic calculations on arrays of numbers. The ufuncs, 
> simple wrappers (dot, for example). Anything that requires 
> nontrivial amounts of math (matrix inversion, statistical 
> functions, generating random numbers from exponential 
> distributions, and so on) should go in scipy. 

As a user, I suggest that this becomes a reasonable goal 
when up to date SciPy installers are maintained for all 
target platforms.  Unless you wish to exclude everyone who 
is intimidated when installation is less than trivial...

Until then, I suggest, the question of the proper 
functionality bundle with NumPy remains open.  Of course as 
a user I do not pretend to resolve such a question---recall 
that I mentioned the slippery slope in my post---but I do 
object to it being dismissed as "silly" when I offered 
a straightforward explanation.

It is well understood that the current view of the
developers is that if anything too much is already in NumPy.
Any user comments are taking place within that context.

Alan Isaac

PS A question: is it a good thing if more students start 
using NumPy *now*?  It looks to me like building community 
size is an important current goal for NumPy.  Strip it down 
like you suggest and aside from Windows users (and Macs are 
increasingly popular among my students) you'll have only the 
few that are not intimidated by building SciPy (which still 
has no intaller for Python 2.5).