Showing posts with label data analysis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label data analysis. Show all posts

2015-07-18

Jupyter (FKA iPython) project gets $6m funding

The Helmsley Charitable Trust, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation just announced a $6m grant to UC Berkeley and Cal Poly to fund Project Jupyter. Jupyter evolved from the iPython project, abstracting the language-agnostic parts. It also serves as an interactive shell for Python 3, Julia, R, Haskell, and Ruby. I think the most notable thing it provides is a web-based GUI “notebook” similar to what has been available in Maple and Mathematica for a while. (Maybe Matlab, too: I have not used Matlab much.)

Correction: Jupyter serves as an interactive shell for a lot more than what I listed. Here is the full list.

2015-05-15

pylab confusions

There are three pylabs that one may encounter in using Python. Two have been around for a while, and the third just showed up less than a month ago.

The “real” pylab is the procedural interface to matplotlib, i.e. a MATLAB-like command line interface. It imports matplotlib.pyplot and numpy into a single namespace. You can use it from ipython’s prompt by calling the magic function “%pylab”. It is no longer recommended by the matplotlib people. The recommended way is to import with abbreviated namespace names, and use the qualified functions. For example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as pltimport numpy as np
x = np.linspace(0, 2, 100)
plt.plot(x, x, label='linear')plt.plot(x, x**2, label='quadratic')plt.plot(x, x**3, label='cubic')
plt.xlabel('x label')plt.ylabel('y label')
plt.title("Simple Plot")
plt.legend()
plt.show()
Then there is the idea/proposal by Keir Mierle to improve on the pylab idea of a single package one might use to utilize Python for interactive analysis. This is written up in the SciPy wiki, but does not seem to have been updated since 2012.

And finally, if you are like me, and have not been thinking too hard, and typed “pip install pylab” you get this new package from PyPI, first added on 2015-04-23. It does nothing but pull in several other Python packages, i.e. it serves as a metapackage. You can see the source is basically a dummy, with all the action in the requirements defined in setup.py.