I just found this comment on my blog. People have told me this in
person too, so I believe it is real pain (even if the solution may be
elusive and the suggested solutions may not work). But I don't know
how to improve the world. Is the work on distutils-sig going to be
enough? Or do we need some other kind of work in addition? Do we need
more than PyPI?

--Guido

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: dalloliogm <noreply-comment@[...].com> 
Date: Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 8:01 AM
Subject: [Neopythonic] New comment on Python in the Scientific World.
To: gvanrossum@[...].com


dalloliogm has left a new comment on your post "Python in the Scientific World":

Python is suffering a lot in the scientific word, because it has not a
CPAN-like repository.

PyPI is fine, but it is still far from the level of CPAN, CRAN,
Bioconductor, etc..

Scientists who use programming usually have a lot of different
interests and approaches, therefore it is really difficult to write a
package that can be useful to everyone.
Other programming language like Perl and R have repository-like
structure which enable people to download packages easily, and to
upload new ones and organize them withouth having to worry about
having to integrate them into existing packages.

This is what is happening to biopython now: it is a monolitic package
that it is supposed to work for any bioinformatic problem; but this is
so general that to accomplish that you would need to add a lot of
dependencies, to numpy, networkx, suds, any kind of library.
However, since easy_install is not as ready yet as the counterparts in
other languages, if the biopython developers add too many
dependencies, nobody will be able to install it properly, and nobody
will use it.



Posted by dalloliogm to Neopythonic at November 6, 2009 8:01 AM


-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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