| > someone who only knows how to plot a graph in python (for example). Hey, I've been writing Python daily for 12 years and I struggle with that! First you have to get matplotlib installed. That often works nowadays, but you have to be sure you've installed numpy first, and on a bad day you'll find yourself looking at some sort of C compiler error and copying stuff from stackoverflow to make libgfortran be found or whatever. Then you try to remember the bizarre way people import matplotlib. Your mind briefly flits to memories of blog posts explaining that matplotlib has two parallel APIs, and you start feeling annoyed about that. Then you start feeling annoyed that one of the APIs is based on matlab; why should a key part of the python ecosystem be apeing matlab? It's not like anyone has ever thought matlab had APIs, or anything really, worth emulating. Anyway, it's something like `from matplotlib.pyplot import plt`, or some nonsense like that. So you spend a few minutes failing to remember, and then googling for it with a rising sense of frustration. Then you get this error: _RuntimeError: Python is not installed as a framework. The Mac OS X backend will not be able to function correctly if Python is not installed as a framework. See the Python documentation for more information on installing Python as a framework on Mac OS X. Please either reinstall Python as a framework, or try one of the other backends._ And now you're really quite annoyed. What the fuck is a framework? It's some MacOS thing but it's always been clear that it's a non-UNIXy concept that you don't want to and shouldn't need to know and you kind of suspect it shouldn't even exist. But holding that opinion would require finding out what it is. So you google for how to overcome that. And then... there's some weird thing where you have to put a line in the middle of your inport statements before importing matplotlib... and finally you wish you hadn't been so stubborn and had just used an IPython notebook, but you just kind of hate them despite how beautiful and well-engineered they are. They can't be version-controlled, you hate typing code into your browser, you always end up with an incomprehensible mess of mutable state, etc. I used to use R and, back then, I enjoyed making plots and did so efficiently and reasonably well. |