Re: Progress toward wxPython

Well, I may be completely oblivious and ignorant, but I really can't
imagine that there was some "split" involving VPython. The Python
developers rather quickly on the scale of things decided to make 1/2
be 0.5, for their own internal reasons. I think that the change had
little to do with the request from someone (me) who at that time had
no standing whatsoever, for the sake of something called VPython,
which at the time had close to zero users and was hardly known. It was
impossible for Python to make an immediate change, due to backward
compatibility issues. In my view that community has done an admirable
job in dealing with this issue, even though it has taken much longer
than one would prefer.

There could have been some kind of split between integer-oriented
computer scientists and floating-point-oriented computational
scientists, but about the major development numpy (and its
predecessors), not the minor development VPython. One could make
cogent arguments for numpy having been part of Python. Despite that,
there is a flourishing community of scientific Python users, the most
visible component being scipy.org and the Sage project. In recent
years there have been two whole issues of the journal "Computers in
Science and Engineering" devoted to Python. A few years ago one of the
astrophysics groups at NCSU abandoned the numerical package they had
been using and switched to Python. Etc. All of which says that the
computational modeling folk were not pushed away from Python by some
hypothesized resistance from Guido and fellow developers.

Bruce Sherwood

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