How to install Python package from source on Windows

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, May 20, 2017 at 9:29 AM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>> I disagree entirely.  For a person who claims to have 40 years
>>programming experience I say he's completely clueless.  Until such time
>> as he can show that he understands source code control, the
>> difficulties in building cross platform code and the other 1,000,001
>> problems that people who have to work in teams have to put up with on
>> a daily basis, I will not be changing my opinion.
>
> That's not really coding, IMO. Just the same sort of cooperation you have to
> do in any sort of endeavour or in a large company.
>
> What I call coding is a lot more hands-on with less reliance on massive
> great toolsets or libraries that already contain everything you could
> possibly need.

Distinguishing the two is like trying to say that debugging isn't
coding. Sure, you can draw lines in the sand and say "this is
programming, this is something else", but the reality is that a
programmer needs to do all of the above. And while I wouldn't call you
"completely clueless", I do say that you are naive and foolish to try
to (a) write code as if you're the only person who'll ever need to run
it, and then (b) berate other people for their complicated build
systems etc. If you're going to live in a bubble, you have no right to
point fingers at people outside it. Face it: you don't even HAVE a
test suite (or at least, I couldn't find one), so you can't even
*know* whether your code works on any other system.

>> Run time speed, which he is completely obsessed with, is for 99.99%
>> of programmers in the 21st century irrelevant.
>
> Fortunately /some/ people are obsessed with these things, otherwise we
> wouldn't have fast processors, fast memory, fast storage, fast connections,
> nor super-optimising compilers.
>
> And we wouldn't have people spending considerable efforts on tracing JITs as
> used for Javascript or the PyPy project for Python.

Even the people who care about performance do not make it their sole
focus. If someone contributes a patch to CPython that makes it run ten
times faster, but totally fail on Windows 8, it will most likely be
rejected, because Windows 8 is a supported platform. Or if the patch
makes everything faster at the expense of preventing anything from
running if there's no internet connection, nobody's interested.
Performance isn't everything.

ChrisA