[IPOL discuss] Python as a platform for reproducible research (... not!)

[Nicolas Limare]

Hi everyone,

Here is an excerpt from a blog post by Kohnrad hinsen abour how Python
is not a perfect solution for long-term software stability, even when
only using the numerical computation Python package. The full text is
at
http://khinsen.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/python-as-a-platform-for-reproducible-research/

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Python as a platform for reproducible research

The other day I was looking at the release notes for the recently
published release 1.8 of NumPy, the library that is the basis for most
of the Scientific Python ecosystem. As usual, it contains a list of
new features and improvements, but also sections such as “dropped
support” (for Python 2.4 and 2.5) and “future changes”, to be
understood as “incompatible changes that you should start to prepare
for”. [...]

From the point of view of reproducible research, all these changes are
bad news. They mean that libraries and scripts that work today will
fail to work with future NumPy releases, in ways that their users, who
are usually not the authors, cannot easily understand or fix. Actively
maintained libraries will of course be adapted to changes in NumPy,
but much, perhaps most, scientific software is not actively
maintained. A PhD student doing computational reasearch might well
publish his/her software along with the thesis, but then switch
subjects, or leave research altogether, and never look at the old code
again. There are also specialized libraries developed by small teams
who don’t have the resources to do as much maintenance as they would
like. [...]

One popular attitude is to say: Just run old Python packages with old
versions of Python, NumPy, etc. This is an option as long as the
versions you need are recent enough that they can still be built and
installed on a modern computer system. And even then, the practical
difficulties of working with parallel installation of multiple
versions of several packages are considerable [...]

-- 
Nicolas LIMARE
http://nicolas.limare.net/                         pgp:0xFA423F4F
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