From: Bruce S. <Bru...@nc...> - 2012-10-21 04:13:11
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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 |