
Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser - mmohades
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/pyodide-bringing-the-scientific-python-stack-to-the-browser/
======
sctb
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17830226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17830226).

~~~
sciurus
Actual previous discussion from less than a day ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19677721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19677721)

I guess this slipped through the dupe detector due to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684806)

~~~
sctb
Just so, thanks!

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demygale
% python —version Python 2.7.15 %

~~~
mrweasel
I get: 3.7.0 (default, Mar 21 2019, 17:54:42) [Clang 6.0.1 ]

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aparashk
Does not work in Safari for me (latest Mojave version).

Happily works in Chrome and Firefox.

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jitl
Can we update the link to the original technical post?

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/pyodide-bringing-the-
scien...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/pyodide-bringing-the-scientific-
python-stack-to-the-browser/)

@dang

~~~
sctb
Sure! Updated from [https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/16/mozilla-details-
pyodide-a...](https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/16/mozilla-details-pyodide-a-
project-that-aims-to-bring-python-to-web-browsers/).

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tomc1985
What.... why? Why must we insist upon piling so many features on top of
browsers? It's a _web browser_ , not an application platform...

~~~
samlevine
You're using a web app now.

Is this bad for the long term preservation of knowledge? Sure. But it's the
world we made.

~~~
schwartzworld
How are webapps worse for the preservation if knowledge than native apps? I
can't open most of the apps I used on a daily basis 10 years ago.

~~~
samlevine
For reasonably complex documents PDF/A is a pretty good choice for long-term
archival:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A)

That said, the comparison I was trying to make was the pre webapp web to the
current web. We have AOL today, just not one big company running it. It will
mostly be lost because it's not legal to save it.

The future will know us through scraped videos from Youtube before it was
taken down suddenly and without warning in the mid 21st century due to
corporate politics and/or the takeover of the government in DC by descendants
of the house of Habsburg.

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mrweasel
Dear Mozilla, I love you, but stop working on these side projects. Your work
in these non-browser projects is excellent, but pointless.

It may be that I don't understand Mozilla, but I believe they should focus on
Firefox, Thunderbird and MDN. Even Rust is sort of a weird CS project that you
don't technically need, but fair enough, if makes Firefox development easier,
go for it.

Mozilla get most of their money from search engine companies, so may they
should start focusing on trimming down to the point where they could survive
without that big Google check and drop some of the side projects.

And why is it that there's no "Support Us By Donating" button on
www.mozilla.org? I feel there should be.

~~~
kej
This is exactly the kind of thing Mozilla _should_ be working on, in my
opinion. It's enabling something new to work in a browser, and if Mozilla
didn't do this Google would have, only it would be locked into Google Sheets
or something.

~~~
mrweasel
Maybe, but is this honestly solving a problem for anyone but the slimmest
niche group. Thimble is no more and in my mind that's a similar kind of
project (I bet most of you forgot that Thimble was a thing). Firefox OS is
dead, Persona is dead, Pocket and Send is still being questioned.

Why should Pyodide or the whole Iodide project be any different. Other than
Firefox, Thunderbird and MDN, only Bugzilla and Rust really stands out as
successful projects, and that's only because they've been developed to solve
an actual problem.

I'd be surprised if the Iodide project will see any real usage 5 years from
now. Are any data scientists really look to move to a browser based workflow?

~~~
alexmorley
This project was designed to meet the internal needs of data science at
Mozilla. Them releasing and developing it openly likely has no/little impact
on the amount of energy going into their core products.

