[SciPy-Dev] changing scipy.org to just be about SciPy the library

[Joe Harrington]

I'm not against it, but the stuff at the top of the page about related 
libraries, docs, getting started, etc. should not disappear, though it 
might move to another site, or be at the head of all the related sites.  
Since NumPy is the base package, and is now better known than SciPy, 
perhaps that material can move there.  I think it would be a mistake to 
have one page per package and not to let new users know what the other 
packages are, how they fit together, how to get docs that describe using 
them together, how to connect to the community, etc.

Also, there should be no confusion on a well written and well designed 
site.  The text can concisely communicate that "SciPy" refers both to a 
specific package and to the community of packages, other resources, and 
people.  Whether it's "SciPy" or not, we need a term for this 
ecosystem.  It isn't the worst thing in the world to change the term, 
especially as use has spread from science to pretty much everything 
numerical.  We've used "Python Numerical Core" in a recent funding 
proposal and community white paper.  "Numerical Python" is shorter, 
though the term has some history from the early days.  I don't (yet!) 
have a strong opinion on what the term should be, as long as it is 
relatively short, descriptive, and obvious.

It isn't even clear to me that the term itself needs its own web page, 
though of course that's a possibility.  I think most people will land in 
our universe either by googling the term "numpy" or something like 
"python math library" (which might take them to the wrong place at 
first), or going to numpy.org, following someone's advice or a link.  
Wherever users are likely to land should have some intro material about 
the ecosystem at the top, and not just dive into the specifics of that 
module, as numpy.org does, currently.

--jh--

On 9/24/19 5:59 AM, Ralf Gommers wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The https://scipy.org/ website has always been about SciPy the 
> ecosystem not SciPy the project/library, and it's always resulted in 
> confusion. I propose we finally change that.  From my review of a 
> recent PR [1] to the scipy.org <http://scipy.org> website repo:
>
> """
> Perhaps the confusing thing here is that https://scipy.org is about 
> "SciPy the ecosystem" rather than "SciPy the library". That's what we 
> would really like to fix, then this becomes a lot more 
> straightforward. So far I had in mind to have a replacement "ecosystem 
> site" before changing scipy.org <http://scipy.org>, however we could 
> go without that. There really isn't that much content on the current 
> site that we'd have to remove, and some of the things that are there 
> now (like SciPy Stack) have become irrelevant. We could easily say 
> that `scipy.org <http://scipy.org>` will be about SciPy the library, 
> while keeping a page like https://scipy.org/about.html that explains 
> the ecosystem context.
> """
>
> Besides some news about and doc hosting for NumPy releases, there's 
> not much content about other projects, and those other projects don't 
> seem to care. The "ecosystem" thing really has had its time. "SciPy 
> ecosystem" isn't even a preferred term anymore I think, the 
> "scientific" is seen as too narrow by a lot of people. PyData or NumPy 
> would be better qualifiers (or some new umbrella term).
>
> We may not be able to do all the work straight away, but I want to get 
> approval for the decision to make scipy.org <http://scipy.org> about 
> the SciPy project now.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Cheers,
> Ralf
>
> [1] https://github.com/scipy/scipy.org/pull/309
>
> _______________________________________________
> SciPy-Dev mailing list
> SciPy-Dev at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-dev
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/attachments/20190924/6bce3e5e/attachment.html>