
Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded? - numfocusfnd
https://www.numfocus.org/blog/why-is-numpy-only-now-getting-funded/
======
rjbwork
We have this problem in the .NET world. Accord.NET is written by a brilliant
academic and programmer. It's well written, and has a good API, but it is
largely the effort of this one dude, with minor contributions from a
smattering of other fellows.

Again, it is great in general, but it has bugs and rough edges here or there,
and a lot of people don't trust it for production. I wish there was a way for
people to be properly compensated for building and maintaining such vital
scientific and mathematical computing software.

~~~
devoply
That's because people don't actually value free things, until they come to
depend on them, and then there is no way for that to continue unless they pay.
And even then they will pay the bare minimum to keep it going. That's the
whole psychology behind open source. Companies could pay for it and those
using it can more than afford to do so, but it's free, and apparently it's
going to stay that way so why not ride that gravy train?

------
jordigh
Also a problem for Octave. Remember this?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575)

It also stings a little when people say that it's completely obsolete because
Matlab itself is "legacy" and we should all be abandoning the language, Octave
included... and yet, even though I like numpy and Python and matplotlib and
Julia and R, I still find myself reaching for Octave whenever I need a quick
visualisation of some data.

~~~
jacobolus
Octave’s “business model” is “give away for free an inferior clone of a
commercial product”. Why is anyone surprised that that isn’t lucrative? Anyone
who has the money to spend on Octave is likely to just pay for Matlab. The
defining feature of Octave users is that they want to use Matlab’s library
ecosystem but they’re too cheap or broke to pay for a copy of Matlab.

~~~
jordigh
Because Matlab is expensive. Very expensive. Especially if you want to run it
on servers or clusters, which is something people want to do. We're talking a
single company paying millions of dollars per year for Matlab licenses, versus
paying thousands for Octave (this does happen, and some companies do pay for
Octave, but very few). My last job consisted in fixing Octave enough to be
able to run some classifiers in servers, which would have been prohibitively
expensive in Matlab and it would have also been much too expensive to rewrite
in a different language. It was cheaper to pay me to fix Octave just enough
for this code to run.

As to the "inferior" part, it really depends. Some people really like the
Octave-exclusive features, but most are unaware they even exist.

~~~
noobermin
What exclusive features are there? I'm interested.

~~~
jordigh
It's really nothing major, but it's the small little cherries on top:

[http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#What_features_are_unique_to_Octav...](http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#What_features_are_unique_to_Octave.3F)

It's a bit of a problem to innovate too much with Octave, because Matlab may
decide to implement a feature we did first, but they'll do it slightly
differently, forcing us to redo our work to match theirs.

------
js8
"The problem of sustainability for open source scientific software projects is
significant."

Yeah, William Stein can tell these stories too:
[http://sagemath.blogspot.cz/2015/09/funding-open-source-
math...](http://sagemath.blogspot.cz/2015/09/funding-open-source-
mathematical.html)

~~~
kronos29296
Yeah, every open source scientific software seems to have an uphill task
before it gets recognized. Sagemath more so than others because of its scale
and having a huge code base. Having to integrate multiple open source projects
isn't helping either.

But its a fine project and one that I use. For a collection of other projects
it works better than most other individual projects.

"Every successful science library has the ashes of an academic career in the
making" \- Same guy

------
Radim
Is the idea that "foundational work" (in any field) can be done without "huge
sacrifices" widely accepted?

It sounds a tad unrealistic to me, unsupported by history.

It's as if people want to have it both ways: Create innovative SW, but also
don't take risks or make sacrifices.

Offer software "for free" (and belligerently oppose even something like GPL),
but also get paid (preferably by the government, so the people actually
footing the bill have no say in it) and be long-term sustainable.

What's next: get paid, but also don't pay income taxes? Give away project
control, but also keep it? :)

All understandable desires, but a little schizophrenic.

 _Disclaimer:_ I am a big fan of open source and NumPy in particular. I mentor
students and OSS newcomers, I even pay one full-time dev to work _only on
OSS_. It's just that I try not to kid myself about where the time&money comes
from and where it goes, and I try not to have random people pay for my
hobbies.

Extremely relevant previous HN conversion on this topic:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14551355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14551355)

~~~
coldtea
Who said people want to do "foundational work"?

The just want to write some specific software they enjoy writing together.

The question rather is: after said software has been proven valuable and
widely used by companies, and when there remain some hard and/or non-enjoyable
parts to be done to complete it/enhance it (specific drivers, documentation,
advanced features, etc), why don't any of the users donate some money to help?

~~~
dagw
Donating company money is really hard, especially if you're just some manager
of some department, and double so if it's not to a registered charity. Much
easier to actually buy something like a support contract or a license where
you get a purchase order and a receipt from a registered organization. People
at companies simply cannot just give company money to random people with
paypal accounts even if they think it's the right thing do to.

~~~
coldtea
> _Donating company money is really hard, especially if you 're just some
> manager of some department, and double so if it's not to a registered
> charity._

Maybe the open source communities should register as charities then? They do
charitable work after all...

~~~
numfocusfnd
This is the function of the fiscal sponsorship program at NumFOCUS. All
fiscally sponsored projects basically come under the umbrella of NumFOCUS'
nonprofit status, so that the projects can receive tax-deductible
contributions, etc.

------
wodenokoto
The "Every successful science library has the ashes of an academic career in
the making" quote has been mentioned several times in the comments, so I
thought I would give a plea to everybody who works in academia to help the
people who build the foundational tools of your research by citing them in
your papers:

[https://www.scipy.org/citing.html](https://www.scipy.org/citing.html)

~~~
torrent-of-ions
Sad to say that I haven't cited these in papers that I've published so far.
Much software is taken for granted, especially libraries. I don't often see
papers mention SciPy specifically let alone add a citation. The author of GNU
Parallel resorted to a message on stderr asking academics to cite it.

But this isn't even the whole story. As we all know, designing and
implementing a program or library is often just the first step. Someone then
has to _maintain_ that code. There is absolutely no incentive for anyone to
maintain these. Institutions will fund _new_ software because they expect a
paper to be published about it. But nobody is paying anyone to maintain this
stuff.

------
sandGorgon
Because developers generally don't know (or don't like) the outreach necessary
to fundraise.

For example in numpy case -
[https://github.com/numpy/numpy.org/issues/9](https://github.com/numpy/numpy.org/issues/9)
That's a request in March 2017 to add a donation button to the website. Im not
sure that 6 months back, if Numpy was legally structured to receive larger
funding. I posted a similar comment (with many more replies) in the context of
Octave and it's funding
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13604564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13604564)

Tl;Dr Don't ask for donations - instead sell "gratitude-ware"

There are tons of people who WANT to support these projects, but you have to
make it easy and accountable to do that. The best example that I usually give
is Sidekiq.

@mperham is awesome that way _" This is exactly why I disclosed my revenue:
people won't know there's a successful path forward unless it's disclosed. I
want more OSS developers to follow my lead and build a bright future for
themselves based on their awesome software."_

In fact, I believe there's a start-up to be done here. "Stripe Atlas for Open
Source software"

~~~
numfocusfnd
NumPy joined NumFOCUS as a fiscally sponsored project in 2015, so it's been
eligible to receive donations as a non-profit (because of NumFOCUS' nonprofit
status) since then.

------
danjoc
>the entire scientific Python stack was essentially relying upon on the “free
time” work of only about 30 people—and no one had funding!

30 people? I remember a time when a certain fruit company would enter a field,
literally hire all 30 of those guys, and put them behind closed doors. Then in
2 years they'd dominate the field for the next decade.

Are these guys turning down offers? Or is the fruit company that poorly
managed now?

~~~
ngoldbaum
There isn't much money in writing libraries like NumPy. Why would a company
hire a bunch of expensive devs to write some software to compete with Matlab?
The market just isn't big enough to justify the cost.

~~~
santaclaus
Google hires devs to develop similar libraries... to power their machine
learning efforts. There is tons of numerical work in finance, too. I don't
think the money is to be made by selling copies of a Matlab-like piece of
software, but in the application of the tools.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
But you have to run through their interview gauntlet.

~~~
dagw
Even if you get head hunted?

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Ken Thompson didn't (still doesn't ?) have commit access because he hasn't
been vetted by Google as a competent C programmer. I don't think Google is
going to relax its hiring policies no matter who you are.

------
projectramo
Q: Are we conflating two issues?

Is there a difference between the "sole developer problem" and the "lack of
funding" problem.

I mean, even if a project finds funding, does it follow that it will attract
more talented developers?

One way to distinguish the two issues is to look at for-profit software. In
the cases where there is one primary developer, do they find it easy to keep
the software going when the person retires?

I ask this because, I think, beyond the very real monetary issue, there is a
question of how development works. Do we need one very talented individual who
does the lion's share of the lifting?

~~~
webmaven
_> even if a project finds funding, does it follow that it will attract more
talented developers?_

It depends on what the funding is used for. Outreach in various forms (better
documentation, presenting at conferences, a nicer website, moderating
community venues from mailing lists to chat channels, triaging and grooming
issues and PRs, etc.) takes time and effort (and therefore needs to be funded)
as well.

~~~
williamstein
For SageMath, what funding we’ve got has been mostly used for organizing many
“Sage Days” workshop coding sprints – we’ve had nearly 100 now over the last
decade! They have made an absolutely tremendous difference in attracting the
over 600 people who have contributed. But also key design decision, e.g., 100%
test coverage, helped too. I clearly remember the moment – in a big discussion
at a Sage Days (funded by the Clay Math Institute) – that Craig Citro argued
for 100% doctest coverage, and we all decided to do it. Without funding, those
Sage Days wouldn’t have happened, and the community would not have developed.
I also remember a Sage Days that we did jointly with Numpy at Enthought, where
discussions and work we did together grew into many important things later.
Funding is ridicuously absolutely critical to growing certain types of open
source projects. In another direction, a lot of our infrastructure (e.g.,
build, testing, etc.,) is hosted on a big computer bought with a grant.

------
travisoliphant
Original NumPy author here. I have a lot to say on this topic, given that it
has literally consumed my life over the past 20 years. You can go here for
some thoughts about some of this:
[http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/](http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/)
There are several articles there that relate but in particular
[http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/2012/10/continuum-
and...](http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/2012/10/continuum-and-open-
source.html) and [http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/2017/02/numfocus-
past...](http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/2017/02/numfocus-past-and-
future.html)

I knew what I was getting into when I wrote NumPy. I knew there was not a
clear way to support my family by releasing open source software, and I knew I
was risking my academic career.

I did it because I believed in the wider benefit of ideas that can be
infinitely shared once created and the need for software infrastructure to be
open-source --- especially to empower the brightest minds to create. I did it
because others had done it before me and I loved using the tools they created.
I hoped I would inspire others to share what they could.

There have been a lot of people who have helped over the years. From employers
willing to allow a few hours here and there to go to the project, to community
members willing to spend nights and weekends with you making things work, to
investors (at Continuum) willing to help you build a business centered on Open
Source.

There are many people who are helping to fix the problem. In 2012, I had two
ideas as to how to help. Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that
I pursued both of them. One was the creation of NumFOCUS that is working as a
non-profit to improve things. The second was the creation of Continuum
([http://www.continuum.io](http://www.continuum.io)) to be a company that
would work to find a way to pay people to work on Open Source full-time.

We have explored several business models and actually found three that work
pretty well for us. One we are growing with investors, a second we are
continuing with, and another we are actually in the process of helping others
get started with and ramping down on ourselves.

Along the way, I've learned that open source is best described in the business
world as "shared R&D". To really take advantage of that R&D you need to
particpate in it.

We call our group that does that our "Community Innovation" group. We have
about 35 people in that group now all building open-source software funded via
several mechanisms.

We are looking for people to help us continue this journey of growing a
company that resonantly contributes significantly to Open Source as part of
its mission. If you are interested, contact me --- I am easy to track down via
email.

~~~
jordigh
Hey, Travis, one question: have you managed to avoid selling non-free
software? Everyone seems to think that eventually the way to sell free
software is to sell some secret sauce on the side. Is this something you have
completely eschewed?

I ask because for Octave this is a non-negotiable requirement. Partly because
of the GPL, but mostly because we really do believe that the whole point of
Octave is to get away from non-free software, as a matter of principle -- if
you want non-free software, there's already a Matlab. Is there any way to
generate enough money without a EULA?

~~~
travisoliphant
I believe it is true that you can make more money selling non-free software
(some of the profits from which should always be used to make free software).

You _can_ generate money only through free software, however. Here are three
approaches I have found: 1) Consult on projects that use the free software and
use some of the profits to support that free software, 2) Sell enterprise-
grade support on the free software to big companies. This is much more than
just help-desk and answer the phone. All commercial software comes with a big
contract. You provide the same kind of contract just no license restrictions.
Others can do the same and so you have to distinguish yourself by either
having all or most of the experts on the software or just really good
marketing. 3) Dual license using GPL3/AGPL for the free version and a
commercial license and then aggressively go after people for GPL violations if
they don't get the commercial license.

I don't like the relationships created by the third model --- your sales
processes become aggressive and counter-service minded by definition. I don't
see it scaling and really providing value.

The other two are really hard to impossible to get investors exited about and
therefore you struggle to get the capital together you need to prime the
customer pump.

There is a another general model with many corollaries where you basically "do
something else" that uses the software as a critical part of the business and
let the profits of that activity fund open-source development.

A lot of open-source these days is actually funded by this kind of activity
(or from VC's hoping to profit from a promise of great wealth from this kind
of activity).

~~~
porker
In 2006 you sold documentation for NumPy [0] - how did that work out?

0\.
[http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/courses/nlp/Software/NumPyBook...](http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/courses/nlp/Software/NumPyBook.pdf)

------
ssivark
There is a long-standing problem in open source software, which is that there
is no "business model" associated with funneling resources to people putting
significant effort into it. Setting up a consulting business to monetize
software creates the perverse incentive to make software harder to use, but
there seem to be some examples where this model has worked out reasonably.

Open source projects are typically started by people working in the field, who
have a strong urge to scratch some itch. Even if we find a way to find money
for them to work full-time, they often don't have the desire to "productize"
software, or to create/nurture/govern an organization around bringing together
different stakeholders who might be able to use, or contribute to the
software. (We got really lucky with Linus+Linux)

------
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
I believe I’m one of (or near) the “top 30” contributors (I’ve made
substantial contributions to all of the aforementioned packages), and I’m
funded to write scientific software. I’m extremely fortunate. Unfortunately,
like so many things, I suspect it has everything to do with pedigree (e.g. my
lab, my institution, my peers, etc.) rather than my (or my coworkers) exact
contributions. In fact, I don’t know if any of my lab’s grants has ever
explicitly mentioned our contributions to one of the discussed packages.
However, this could change. I’m extremely encouraged, for example, by the
comments from new institutions like OpenAI or the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
about the necessity of funding software.

------
ArneBab
Another project which is easy to overlook: Think about how many scientists use
Emacs for most of their development and writing. But there is (to my
knowledge) not even a single paid developer working on it.

( [http://gnu.org/s/emacs](http://gnu.org/s/emacs) )

------
mschaef
It's surprising to me that people are surprised by this.

Even setting aside the fact that the people that can do this work are few in
number, the vast majority of people need a way to support themselves and their
family. If the number of people that have these skills is low, the subset that
is both altruistic enough to donate them for a sufficient period of time and
personally able to do so must be vanishingly small. (And the negative feedback
a lot of OSS maintainers receive doesn't help.)

Companies have the same issue... there has to be a fairly direct connection
between an expenditure (paying developers) and a return on that investment.
That can be a very difficult argument to make.

------
mtmail
If your open source project needs funding there is
[https://opencollective.com/opensource](https://opencollective.com/opensource)
(currently waiting, I'm not affiliated)

~~~
SwellJoe
Look at the numbers before assuming this is a solution to funding Open Source.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just that the amounts it's bringing in for
most projects is effectively like buying the developer a cup of coffee. It's
not a sustainable sum for someone to live on, in almost all cases.

Right now, Webpack has $99k; which is respectable. That's a decent annual
salary for a full-time developer that lives anywhere other than Silicon Valley
or NYC. But, it falls off a cliff after that. Next is MochaJS at 16k; that's
two months salary, maybe three or four in cheap places. After the top twenty
projects, you're closer to nothing than you are to something. The time it
takes to set it up would be worth more than it'll return (there are lots of $0
projects in the list).

Maybe it'll improve with time. I dunno how long this project has been going
on, and it looks really well done. It's just that the numbers are abysmal. I
hope it'll improve. I wish we had a way to fund our software without having to
sell a commercial version...but, it's so far from realistic, we can't really
even consider it.

I've been making my living from OSS for ~20 years now, and it's the great
curse and tragedy of the thing that because the software is free, there's an
incredibly pervasive belief that tiny sums are sufficient to keep a project
afloat.

We tried, very early on (~14 years ago now), to crowd-fund some major
enhancements to our software...we raised a total of about $15,000 (this was
long before crowd-funding was a thing), which to a lot of people seemed like a
lot of money, and it caused a lot of folks to feel extraordinarily entitled to
specific results (e.g. because they contributed $200, they assumed it would
mean we'd develop a big feature they were the only person asking for, and that
would take days or even weeks to build and test). But, for two developers
working full-time on something, $15,000 is practically nothing. Most
developers just don't have the freedom to trade in a full-time job paying
market rates for a sub-poverty annual wage. Realistically, we couldn't commit
full-time to the project until we started a business based on it that brought
in predictable, recurring revenue. And, we couldn't effectively do that
without providing things that the OSS version didn't have. OSS is a really
tough way to make a living, is what I'm trying to say, and I don't know a lot
of people who do it successfully without being employed by someone that does a
lot of non-OSS stuff, too.

------
santaclaus
It blows my mind that NumPy is just getting funding. How did the Eigen (used
in TensorFlow, among other things) folks keep it going?

~~~
ajtulloch
A few of the Eigen core devs (Benoit Jacob, Benoit Steiner, ...) work at
Google.

------
mattfrommars
Ok, so the problem seems to be 'lack of maintainer' or could be stretched to
contributer. The article later linked to
[https://www.slideshare.net/NadiaEghbal/consider-the-
maintain...](https://www.slideshare.net/NadiaEghbal/consider-the-maintainer)
which kind of reminded me a problem which I'm facing.

After getting through basic of "Introduction to Computer Science Using Python"
and forever pending goal to become a "Python Developer", is anyone here who is
experience in Python willing to be my mentor? In return, free Python labor. :)

~~~
webmaven
What sort of things ("Python development" is a bit nebulous) are you most
interested in?

~~~
mattfrommars
The sort of things which people get to call themselves "Python Full Stack
Developer" or people whose primary job is to write Python code at some
workplace. I just want to work in something where is Python is used and in
great demand to get me a full time job. My latest depth into Python apart of
learning the surface has been with Flask. Developed a CRUD using a tutorial
and there is absolute so much to learn. But if I learn a lot about Flask, I
won't be playing with Django which seems to have more demand. I also like to
have Python projects on my Github but so far, I have no clue what to make on
it and to publish. Just want to be able to develop anything by knowing the
art!

------
teekert
I tried at work to get some money to the maintainer of iRAP, an RNA sequencing
analysis pipeline we depend on heavily at the moment. But business sees this
as wasted money, it's there for free, why not take it? Reading this, I think
I'm going to double down on my efforts again. We get so much value out of a
huge pile of FOSS software, we should be donating. Meanwhile we have spend
piles of money on Matlab for years and we aren't even allowed to run Linux on
our Laptops if we wanted to.

~~~
Vinnl
I think someone on here recently suggested to a project that they provide an
"enterprise subscription" or something like that with minor benefits to make
it easier for businesses to justify (or maybe it made administration easier?)
to "donate". You could suggest that to the maintainer, and then use that to
convince business that you need that.

------
largote
Because it's an important tool for Machine Learning, which makes money from
that (of which there's plenty going around right now) flow into it.

------
jeremynixon
This is still an important problem for numerical compute in other languages.
It's a struggle to do data analysis and write machine learning applications in
Scala, Java, C++, etc. due to a lack of Numpy / Pandas style ease of use and
functionality.

------
abousara
Each country have its own taxes to sustain fundamentals, same thing must apply
in software industry. Software engineers might be paid +100k$ while developing
over open source languages/frameworks or libraries. That's is not fair, it is
like riding a starving horse.

A French point of view (after all, France invented VAT...) would suggest to
introduce a taxe on software engineers salaries (1% ?) and redistribute this
fund on most used languages/frameworks/libraries and use a part to sustain a
new projects.

~~~
adrianN
How about instead of taxing the workers we tax the companies that profit from
open source efforts.

~~~
abousara
Let me explain better, no software engineer (SE) would be paid above 30k$ if
he always starts from scratch (walking). He is paid its economic value for
being fast. And he is fast because he rides a horse (building over open source
language/framework/library).

So while a part of SE are maintaining stables, other part of SE don't want to
pay for horse. I think this last part of SE are killing their own jobs.

~~~
adrianN
The software engineer is paid because they produce value for they employer.
It's upon the employer, not the employee to pay for the technological
infrastructure.

~~~
abousara
That's right. But when your employer will ask to shift infrastructure because
old one is no more maintained, and to be as productive as before, you'll be
very slow at development and get fired. If the employee is paying for the
infrastructure, this is because SE are not solidary to open source projects.

------
alannallama
This is exactly the problem Open Collective[0] exists to solve. Often times,
there are people who want to financially support a given open source project,
but there is no channel by which to do so. Creating the financial channel is
the first step toward a much needed culture change where the assumption is you
will support the open source you rely on, especially if you're making money
off it.

[0] [http://www.opencollective.com](http://www.opencollective.com)

------
prewett
I thought that Enthought sponsored a lot of NumPy development, kind of like as
a corporate caretaker or something, is that not the case?

~~~
acqq
I'd also like to read about what Enthought actually did. Anybody knows the
details and willing to tell?

------
kem
I appreciate this article being posted, and have the utmost respect for NumPy
developers. The urgency and discrepancy between use of certain important open-
source libraries, and their support, is bewildering sometimes.

As I was thinking about it, though, I'm not surprised NumPy hasn't been funded
before. The reasons why say a lot about biases in memory.

It wasn't that long ago that the sorts of things NumPy does were seen as
fairly niche, and in the domain of statistics or engineering. It's only with
relatively recent interest in AI and DL that this has been seen as within the
purview of Silicon Valley-comp sci-type business, as opposed to EE or
something different. I still am kind of a little disoriented--the other day,
looking through our university's course catalog, I realized that certain
topics that would have been taught in the stats or psychology departments are
now being seen as the territory of comp sci. Statisticians have written
excoriations about being treated as if they don't exist, as comp sci blithely
barrels forward, reinventing the wheel.

I'm not meaning to take sides with these issues, only pointing out that I
think the world we live in was very different not so long ago. It might seem
puzzling that NumPy hasn't had more funding, but I think that's in part
because what it's most profitably used for now wasn't really seen as much more
than academic science fiction not too long ago.

The other part of it too, is that until relatively recently, if you were to do
numerical heavy lifting, you'd almost certainly be expected to do that in
C/C++ or maybe Fortran. There's a tension in numerical computing, between the
performance and expressiveness that's needed, and Python is on one end of that
continuum, far from the end that is traditionally associated with complex
numerical computing. Sure, you had things like MATLAB with Python in the same
functional role, but those were largely seen as teaching tools, or something
that engineers did for one-off projects, having learned to do that in school
(I still think the use of python in ML derives from the use of Python as a
teaching tool in uni).

I'm not trying to knock Python or NumPy or anything, just kind of trying to
convey a different perspective, which is that I can remember a time not too
long ago when the use of Python in numerics was seen as primarily didactic in
nature, or for limited circumscribed applications.

FWIW, it seems to me Python is kind of on a path similar to what happened with
javascript, which was treated as kind of an ancillary helper language on the
web, until Google started pushing its limits. Then there was browser wars 2.0,
and huge efforts put into javascript, and it became a main player in network
computing. To me, there's a similar trend with Python: it really kind of
existed as a language for prototyping and scripting tasks, and now finds
itself in a different role than it has been used for traditionally, and
projects in that area are getting an influx of money accordingly. What I see
happening is (1) a blossoming diversity of numerical computing communities
(Haskell, Python, Julia, Kotlin, Scala, Rust, Go, etc.), due to competition
and variation in application scenarios and preferences, (2) a huge influx of
resources being put into Python to make it more performant, or (3) people
jumping ship from Python into one of those other platforms to get more bang-
for-the buck [or (4) some combination of all of these.]

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anigbrowl
Because capitalism is an inherently exploitative economic paradigm?

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carapace
tl;dr:

> "And if you’d like to take action to contribute to project sustainability,
> consider becoming a NumFOCUS member today."

[https://www.numfocus.org/community/donate/](https://www.numfocus.org/community/donate/)

