[SciPy-Dev] usage of inspect.getargspec ?

[Charles R Harris]

On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at googlemail.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 7:48 PM, <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 10:42 AM,  <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 10:37 AM, Gael Varoquaux
>> > <gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org> wrote:
>> >> On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 03:11:26PM +0000, Robert Kern wrote:
>> >>> > My view is that simple things should be simple --- especially for
>> the occasional user.
>> >>
>> >>> My main problem with this view is that I don't think that whether you
>> >>> need a Hessian or not is the reasonable line to draw between "simple
>> >>> things" and "not so simple things". The problem with using
>> >>> getargspec() is that it is unreliable. It doesn't work for many
>> >>> reasonable inputs (like say a wrapper function that wraps the real
>> >>> function with one that takes *args,**kwds or extension functions or
>> >>> bound methods or objects with __call__). Knowing that you have one of
>> >>> these cases requires some rather deep experience with Python.
>> >
>> > Just to illustrate the problem: a question with inspect by a
>> stackoverflow user
>> >
>> >
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7615733/too-many-arguments-used-by-python-scipy-optimize-curve-fit
>>
>> and, I'm sorry if I sound grumpy at times.
>>
>> I'm spending a large amount of time on code maintenance, and this
>> change promises several days of bug hunting, finding work-arounds and
>> answering questions on stack overflow for no clear benefits that I can
>> see, so I'd rather announce my opinion in advance.
>>
>
> The issue is clear I think. How about we undo this change, agree not to
> use things like the inspect module unless absolutely necessary, and catch
> this in review next time?
>
>
I'll add that I removed one use of the inspect module in numpy because is
stopped working in Python 3.


> It would be good though if some people could still look at the minimize()
> API. Right now it hasn't been released yet, so we can make any change that
> would make it simpler/cleaner.
>
>
Chuck
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