> Have always hated the half-ass integration Windows has. Half the stuff does not work as it should or is broken, no one tests on Windows and I doubt they will start now.
What? Python has been one of the significant exceptions on this front because Enthought actually shipped a product which was expected to work on Windows. Python also goes out of its way to make sure that things work in sane ways even when Windows has no real equivalent.
I also suspect this is one of the reasons for Python's ascendancy over other scripting languages. By being one of the few scripting languages that runs decently on Windows, you gain an automatic user population advantage.
Maybe I'm dreaming this... Trying to install some Python package on Windows 8.1 and 'the usual' stuff didn't work.
I'm a python newb and maybe I wasn't doing something right. I'm more used to Linux/Perl and doing "Perl -M CPAN ..." which just works. 'pip ...' just didn't.
I was not left with the feeling that Python ran as well on Windows as on Linux.
pip is unfortunately a a bit hit and miss on Windows. The (IMO) 'correct' way to install package on windows is to first install Anaconda Python (https://www.continuum.io/downloads) and then:
0) Check if the package came preinstalled with Anaconda
It definitely doesn't. People writing Python packages make reasonable assumptions like that you've got a POSIX command line, a UTF-8-compatible terminal, and a C compiler that's compatible with the Python development headers. On Windows, you probably don't.
It'd be nice if Windows made an effort to provide a sane environment for Python, because the Python devs certainly aren't doing anything to make things sane on Windows.
Ubuntu server VM in vbox with shared folders works better than anything I've tried to get things working well I native Windows. Sure it's not impossible, but the tax isn't worth it IMO.
You need to manually add the directory containing pip and other tools to the path.
If it is not, you can often do python -mpip install xxxxx
And you're right there are some gotchas - for instance pip install -U pip won't work to update pip itself as on Windows a program can't seem to overwrite it's own executable.
AFAIK (and I have dozens of virtualenvs running on a Windows box) you can upgrade pip, it's just one of a handful of packages that throws an error at the end because it was unable to delete the folder it created during the install process. The upgrade works, it just looks like it doesn't. But maybe that's only true inside a virtualenv.
I'm under the (quite possibly mistaken memory) impression that the Enthought guys (ScipPy and NumPy) hid installation stuff behind a GUI for Windows people.
I could be wrong as it's been a long time since I helped anybody with that on Windows.
What? Python has been one of the significant exceptions on this front because Enthought actually shipped a product which was expected to work on Windows. Python also goes out of its way to make sure that things work in sane ways even when Windows has no real equivalent.
I also suspect this is one of the reasons for Python's ascendancy over other scripting languages. By being one of the few scripting languages that runs decently on Windows, you gain an automatic user population advantage.