On Friday, August 9, 2013 9:10:18 PM UTC-4, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > I am seeking comments on PEP 450, Adding a statistics module to Python's > > standard library: > > > > http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0450/ > > > > Please read the FAQs before asking anything :-) >
I think this is a super idea. Python is showing up in high-school and colllege intro programming courses here in the U.S. Having a solid statistics module built in would work well in that context and make it even more natural as a complement to math courses. Beyond the educational aspect, having a built-in module to *correctly* handle the frequent light-weight use cases would be useful across many professional disciplines. I use NumPy on a daily basis and help scientists with installation problems frequently. I can emphatically state that NumPy is not easy to install for newbies. Open up a brand new Mac and look, no compilers! Even experienced users can have problems with gfortran vs. g77 etc. Anyone that has ever built BLAS/ATLAS from source will also tell you that SciPy is definitely not a simple "pip install" on many platforms (particularly if you don't have root). - Tom -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
