PEP 450 Adding a statistics module to Python

[taldcroft at cfa.harvard.edu]

On Friday, August 9, 2013 9:10:18 PM UTC-4, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> I am seeking comments on PEP 450, Adding a statistics module to Python's 
> 
> standard library:
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0450/
> 
> 
> 
> Please read the FAQs before asking anything :-)
> 

I think this is a super idea.  Python is showing up in high-school and colllege intro programming courses here in the U.S.  Having a solid statistics module built in would work well in that context and make it even more natural as a complement to math courses.  Beyond the educational aspect, having a built-in module to *correctly* handle the frequent light-weight use cases would be useful across many professional disciplines.

I use NumPy on a daily basis and help scientists with installation problems frequently.  I can emphatically state that NumPy is not easy to install for newbies.  Open up a brand new Mac and look, no compilers!  Even experienced users can have problems with gfortran vs. g77 etc.   Anyone that has ever built BLAS/ATLAS from source will also tell you that SciPy is definitely not a simple "pip install" on many platforms (particularly if you don't have root).

- Tom