[Chicago] MIT Python course and pylab installation.

[Bob Haugen]

Kyler, thanks a lot for telling us about pipdeptree.

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 12:10 AM, Kyler Brown <kylerjbrown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Douglas,
>
> There's a nice entry in the FAQ here:
> http://matplotlib.org/faq/usage_faq.html#matplotlib-pyplot-and-pylab-how-are-they-related
>
> My understanding is that pylab isn't a dependency, but a convenience package
> that imports numpy and pyplot functions into the main namespace. I think
> pylab was important when the scientific python community was young and most
> new users were coming from Matlab. Now it's just cruft.
>
> In general python packages can install dependencies. For example, the
> date-parsing package 'arrow' requires the package 'dateutil'. Here's the
> line in arrow's setup.py specifying that dependency:
> https://github.com/crsmithdev/arrow/blob/master/setup.py#L40 so if you `pip
> install arrow` you end up with dateutil as well.
>
> You might be interested in exploring dependencies with this tool:
> https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pipdeptree
>
> Cheers!
> Kyler
>
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 11:05 PM, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Hello to all Pythonistas in the Chicago area.
>>
>> I just completed the first of two MIT online courses in Python, and I was
>> very impressed with the quality of this course.  My only criticism is that
>> it seemed that a little too much time was given at the beginning of the
>> course for assignments, and by the end of the course not enough time was
>> given for the completion of programming assignments, exercises, etc, but of
>> course this is very often the case in many courses, whether they are online
>> or in a classroom.  But in general I thought this course was really good.
>> The video lectures were fantastic, the problem sets were highly instructive
>> and thought provoking, and I learned a lot about Python and programming in
>> general.  Excellent course.  I highly recommend it to anyone who is just
>> starting out with Python, and even experienced Python programmers might
>> benefit from a course such as this one.  The discussion forum was also
>> pretty good, although I didn't really take advantage of it very much.
>>
>> On a different topic.... I just got done installing Python3.6 on my Linux
>> machine using ./configure, then make, and then sudo make install.  It worked
>> great, no problems.  Then I used pip3.6 to install the following packages:
>> numpy, scipy and also matplotlib.  What's rather curious to me is that the
>> pylab package also got installed!  But I didn't use pip to install that
>> package.  I think it just "piggy backed along" when I installed matplotlib.
>> Is that normal behavior?  Can explicitly requested packages implicitly
>> request other packages when those packages serve as dependencies?  I'm
>> guessing that pylab is a dependency for matplotlib, hence when I requested
>> matplotlib, pip had to implicitly request the installation of pylab as well,
>> but here I'm just guessing.  My installation "appears to be" pretty good,
>> but.... I'm not extremely experienced with installing stuff on Linux so I
>> thought it might be a good idea to get some advice from the Python pros out
>> there.
>>
>> Thanks in advance for the constructive feedback and I pray that everyone
>> has a wonderful, peaceful and productive week.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Douglas Lewit
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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