Re: [Matplotlib-users] advice on writing an application

[Fernando P. <Fer...@co...>]

massimo sandal wrote:

>>I'm also really very concerned about the priority given to pylab and ipython.
> 
> 
> I'm really concerned about it too. As a MPL newbie, I found it very
> misleading. I'd like to see a full programming stack on top of MPL, with
> pylab, MPlot and wxMpl being integrated components of it, and with a
> nice documentation about it.

Chill out, there is no dark plan here :)  It's simply a matter of usage 
patterns: my personal audience is one of other programmers, I'm mostly an 
algorithms developer and the code I write is used by other mathematicians, 
physicists, etc. to write programs.  Hence,  command-line, interactive use is 
_my_ priority, and I did the work (along with John's and others' help) to make 
sure that mpl would work as well as possible in this context.  I have 
currently no need to write GUIs, so I haven't worked on that.  Others also 
liked these capabilities, and contributed for example the interactive Qt support.

I think it's great that a nice set of OO, high-level tools is being developed 
for MPL with WX, I may even need those in the future.  If others need similar 
Qt or Tk-based tools they may also develop them, which is great as well.

You need to understand that this is simply how free software works: when 
someone needs something badly enough _for themselves_, they get off their butt 
and write it.  Then it's available for all to use (if released).  I did that 
for interactive mpl support over a year ago, so that's why it's been 
prominently displayed for a while (and this _is_ useful to a lot of people, 
since quick-and-dirty interactive data analysis is a very common task).  Now 
you guys are doing the same for WX tools, and that's fantastic.   I'm sure 
John will advertise it equally prominently.

So relax, nobody is trying to be misleading about anything, we're all here 
simply working on what each of us needs, so the evolution process is rather 
inhomogeneous.

Cheers,

f