On Tuesday, August 1, 2017 at 1:24:51 PM UTC+2, takowl wrote: > > On 1 August 2017 at 11:45, <[email protected] <javascript:>> wrote: > >> In the past, I had a shell alias for sympy which asks for the sympy >> profile, but obviously this is not supported any longer. >> > > I think sympy still has 'isympy' to launch an IPython console with sympy > already set up. >
Indeed, it exists. But it only does terminal console as far as I can tell, so no LaTeX-based pretty-printing... > Creating a dedicated sympy kernel as you suggest seems possible but a bit >> heavy-handed for such a simple thing (and nothing I can tell my students in >> order to lower the barrier of entry...). >> > > It's very light in computer terms - just a couple of tiny files on your > disk. I agree it's not very convenient for students, though. I can't think > of anything you can do to make it simpler for them than importing and > calling a function. > It's not just students, it's also myself. I am a working Mathematician and I don't do this every day. The starting up of sympy (in the most user-friendly environment) seems very non-discoverable and non-intuitive. Even about one hour after my last mail I could not remember the package to load on top of my head without scrolling back up to my previous message to check. When I need to fire up sympy to check some computation, I have my mind on the math and don't want to be distracted by remembering some relatively arbitrary start-up magic. In fact, after my first post I simply fired up Mathematica to get the work done as that's a command I can remember... Installing a dedicated sympy kernel makes me feel uneasy, I want something that works on any machine, any account from a canonical base installation. Even my shell alias is something I don't really like to do (the current breaking at inconvenient time is a case in point), I'd prefer using a supported method if one existed. > Yes, I do need to switch profiles as I am using both pylab and sympy >> interactively. Funny enough, ipython has a builtin magic for pylab, but >> none for sympy. I am not sure how much this forum is connected to ipython, >> but that would be an obvious trivial thing to add that would more or less >> solve the issue of getting a working sympy console quickly in the most >> obvious way. >> > > The %pylab magic is gently deprecated, and I doubt we'd go for a new magic > command to integrate with a particular module - sorry! > This is unfortunate. Not that I like magic commands very much, but they are useful. So if you deprecate them, please make sure that things don't get much more heavy-handed and undiscoverable. The main competitors are Matlab and Mathematica (from my point of view). So if simple things like getting a convenient environment for one-off quick computations get too inaccessible, then the python-based solutions simply don't get used. Best regards, Marcel -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Project Jupyter" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jupyter/a0a8b653-147d-4f09-80d4-cb749f8cfd90%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
