[Numpy-discussion] Hello and my first patch

[A. M. Archibald]

On 05/10/06, Greg Willden <gregwillden at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/5/06, Travis Oliphant <oliphant at ee.byu.edu> wrote:
> > Perhaps that is the best way to move forward along with the work on a
> > "pylab" super-package.
>
> That is exactly what I want.

What is unsatisfactory about installing numpy+scipy+matplotlib? I've
found they're generally pretty complete (except where no decent python
alternative exists).

> In the end I want a nice collection of functions, logically organized, that
> let me analyze/filter/plot etc. etc. etc.
>
> The key for me is "logically organized".

For the most part, the organization is pretty logical:
* Basic array and matrix operations in numpy
* linear algebra, differential equation, interpolation, etc. tools are
in scipy, each in their own subpackage
* weave is mysteriously in scipy
* plotting tools are in matplotlib

There are a few historical quirks, like window functions in numpy
(they really belong in scipy), and some of the less-used scipy
subpackages are a bit of a mess internally (scipy.interpolate for
example), but otherwise I'm not sure what you want to be different.

> And right now that means "So a newbie can find the function I need and the
> function I need is there"
>
> I'm not criticising.  I'd like to help get there.

Install all three major packages. Use the window functions from scipy
in matplotlib.

Task-oriented documentation is so far a bit scant, although the scipy
cookbook (http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook ) and the numpy examples list
(http://www.scipy.org/Numpy_Example_List ) are a good start.

A. M. Archibald