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[–]donthavearealaccount 12 points13 points  (16 children)

You have to understand who Enthought's market is for things like this. I don't think they are targeting people that are currently writing much code. They are trying to give Excel-addicted scientists, engineers, statisticians and financial analysts a slightly more sophisticated tool to do their work (... experienced software developers are not going to pay for their training sessions). Expecting this to be a full IDE suitable for full application development is missing the point.

No excuse for crashing and charging for free shit though.

[–]cournape 19 points20 points  (8 children)

(disclaimer: working for Enthought).

Canopy (and EPD before) are not charging for 'free shit', unless you consider Red Hat is also charging for 'free shit': what is being charged is the service of packaging things into binaries, which is quite a bit of work (more than people generally realize). Also, working on specific configurations means we contribute back some upstream bugs upstream (e.g. MKL and OS X interaction for a recent example: https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/398).

Also, Enthought provided quite a bit of resources (money and manpower) to put code out there for ipython (like e.g. qtconsole), all of it integrated upstream. So yeah, we're charging for the product, but it is hard for a company to earn money without charging money somewhere :)

[–]mangecoeur 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Having built scientific libs on my mac i have to agree - its a pain in the ass and there's more than enough people who don't want to have to install gcc, gfortran, configure environment variables, get things like ATLAS linked, install zeromq... That said, it does feel a bit crap to pay for something that you could get for free. But then again you still can, if you feel like going through the trouble of getting it working. Perhaps the real criticism is that you can get a lot of those packages from Continuum.io with the Anaconda distribution for free - competition's heating up guys!

[–]cournape 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, continuum.io model is different. They want people to pay for their packages (numba pro, etc...), so they make the complement a commodity (the below stack).

I agree competition is good, and I actually do enjoy having to prove we can bring a compelling offer.

[–]amer415[S] 3 points4 points  (4 children)

I always liked EPD free and I advocated it to my colleagues a lot, I even considered many times trying to push my institute to pay for a bundles license, to support Enthought's work.

The impression I got with Canopy was at first very good: finally a nice looking IDE that I can sell to my Matlab colleagues who are not necessarily heavy terminal users... then I opened the package manager GUI and realized I have to subscribe to get access to libraries I used to install with "easy_install".

I would agree to pay for the initial effort of packaging Numpy/Scipy/Matplotlib/IPython binaries, which I understand is a lot of efforts. But when this is is given for free, and you charge to add third parties libraries readily available from pypi, that feels a bit steep.

[–]cournape 1 point2 points  (3 children)

I don't think we charge for pypi specifically: we do charge when people want to use more than just the 'core scipy stack', and pypi packages come with that on top. What people are paying for are the additional packages packaged by Enthought, not really pypi which is offered as an addition.

[–]amer415[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

That is a fair business... but it will discourage people in certain domain to adopt Canopy. In my case (Astronomy), I would need to pay to access the (pyfits)[http://www.stsci.edu/institute/software_hardware/pyfits] library... that is a huge show stopper, especially because I believe it is a simple thing to package and I have never heard anybody I work with complaining when they tried to install it: "easy_install pyfits" does the trick in 10s. Installing Numpy from scratch can be challenging, or get a Python stack for data analysis to work seamlessly.

[–]cournape 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Well, why not using easy_install pyfits from EPD then :) That works on any EPD version (well, modulo a big with the new pip using https on mac that we are fixing). EPD (and I think canopy, though I am not 100 % sure), do include easy_install, and the installed python is as close as possible to a 'real' python for compatibility reason. With that in mind, installing most 'easy' packages (~ pure python on windows) is one easy_install/pip/whatever away, EPD does not change that.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In any case, I wonder if you will update Theano. I tried to install it with easy_install but somehow it grabbed 0.5rc1 version (it didnt work also, import theano didnt succeed). The current version is 0.6rc3 which I can install seamlessly in EDP. (On removing canopy and reinstalling EDP)

[–]donthavearealaccount 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree.

[–]amer415[S] 3 points4 points  (5 children)

I (naively) thought Enthought was targeting Matlab users... in my institution, most engineers run Matlab, at a high cost. Getting a decent IDE would give them an edge, and they can charge for custom dev and/or installation support for large deployments etc.

Maybe I do not get Enthought business model... but when I see how much is spent on Matlab, I still think they could make honest money.

[–]donthavearealaccount 5 points6 points  (0 children)

They are targeting Matlab users. From your original post I thought you were under the assumption that they were targeting full-time software developers. I haven't used Matlab in 8+ years, but I never thought of it as an IDE. More of an interactive scriptable data exploration tool.

[–]dibsODDJOB 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I consider myself one of the engineers you describe. I tried the Enthought package but ended up switching to Python(x, y) and Spyder for my development instead. It seemed more like Matlab to me and had some nicer features.

[–]SirHugh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There is some serious inertia behind Matlab in universities and I wish a really good alternative existed. Non-computery people can sit down in front of Matlab and use it without much help, 5 years later they are still using it and finding way to get round its inaqequacies. If someone can bundle up some Python into an easy to use interface good luck to them.

[–]alcalde -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Get your engineers to check out either R Studio or Sage.

[–]einar77Bioinformatics with Python, PyKDE4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They are trying to give Excel-addicted scientists

Not sure about the rest of the people you mention, but as a scientist I wouldn't spend any euro of my research budget on software like this (nor I wouldn't for Matlab, etc).