
Numpy announces Python 3 support (Scipy news included) - jnoller
http://www.mail-archive.com/numpy-discussion@scipy.org/msg26524.html
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jacobolus
This is absolutely huge news (esp. once the release version is out, and scipy
fully ported) for anyone writing number-crunching code. Python 3 has some neat
new low-level abstractions for dealing with sequential data (see PEP 3118
<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3118/> which was incidentally written by
the primary author of numpy), meaning that it should become even easier to
exchange data between numpy and (for example) various image and audio
systems/APIs. Many modern examples of such APIs are being structured in the
same way to take data with arbitrary size/stride parameters. For example,
Apple’s new (as of 10.4 I believe?) image/color API is structured in such a
way. It should be possible to trivially wrap that API, and just pass in any
numpy array with the relevant dimensions, no matter the specific memory
layout, and have everything “just work”, no intermediate data-organization-
massaging required.

Numpy has a fantastic syntax/API/feature set (advanced slicing, the fantastic
automatic "broadcasting" of differently shaped arrays, a “batteries included”
set of common operations), that in my experience makes coding matrix math much
more pleasant than, say, Matlab. Numpy code is concise, readable, and
relatively efficient, and very easy to mix-and-match with C and Fortran code
when that’s helpful. Best of all (compared to, say, Matlab or Mathematica)
it’s free!

More and more scientific computing, especially of the quick one-off type, is
being done with numpy, and getting numpy to Python 3 can only help both numpy
and Python to keep attracting new number-crunchers. I long for a day when, for
example, the code accompanying SIGGRAPH papers is written in Python/numpy.

~~~
HSO
Hehe, just returned from Euroscipy '10 and somewhat drunk so forgive me for my
bad English. After seeing all the awesome applications of Python using
Numpy/Scipy in science during 4 days and interacting with (parts of) the
community, all I can say is, "right on" and heads up to the developers and the
organizers!!! See you all again next year... :)

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forsaken
Interesting. I know Scipy are one of the biggest communities of Python users.

Once Django (and all it's dependencies, specifically the database backends)
are ported over to Python 3, I think a critical mass will have been
established in the move to Python 3.

~~~
illumen
It's been heart breaking after putting so much effort myself into working on
python3 stuff to see the Django people, and the other big slow python
framework... zope/plone ignore it.

Boo to Django.

~~~
jacobolus
One problem for Django and similar projects is that many hosted systems, etc.,
still only run 2.3 or 2.4, and they don’t want to cut those people off for as
long as they can. As far as I know it’s rather difficult to write code that
works on both 2.3/2.4 and 3.x, since the 2to3 tool assumes a recent 2.x
version.... so my understanding is that they’re phasing out one python version
or so each release, with the hopes of eventually getting to a 2.6+/3.x
release.

I don’t think they’re really “ignoring” Py3k.

Then again, I’m not really an expert.

~~~
illumen
It's not that hard to support 2.4-3.1 with the same code base. It's been done,
and documented by a bunch of projects now.

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juanefren
Still waiting for Django, ReportLab, xlrd, xlwt, html2pdf... after these I
will not have any more excuses.

