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Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

paulromer.net

61–70 of 286 posts

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. It’s not that bad of a solution when you think about it.

Anaconda (and miniconda) is a very good solution if you need a container-like environment. I can easily go back to old projects with different python versions and do maintenance in them with no hassle.

pyproject.toml is a better solution

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#62
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guide requires holding down arcane secret key combination, this is not remotely normal way to do anything, and prevents people from learning basic system commands every programmer needs to know. Also, “mv ~/.zsh ~/zsh-anaconda”.

His audience is not programmers.

It quite literally is for students learning Python.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#63
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you teach a course that requires Python" "Many of these students have not used the command line." I'd suggest that we are failing to teach students learning to code, the basics of how to use computers. Pre-requisite should be a class on how to use the command line.

Most of the kids the author is talking about aren't going to ever code for a living - they're going to code to get their job done. It's a very different mindset.

By that logic... we might as well stop teaching math because kids are never going to become mathematicians.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#64

Clickbait title (“stranglehold”, really?), and also really bad advice. Terminal can be scary, but “open terminal from Applications/Utilities” and typing “rm ~/.zsh” is objectively easier. Also that’s not even the best solution, just a far better way to do this solution.

Pythons and anacondas are snakes which catch and kill their prey by strangling them and inducing cardiac arrest. It’s a pun.

Come on, putting “macOS” and “stranglehold” in a title is not merely a (bad) pun; it plays into article titles which adhere to common complaints, and topical complaints about macOS/Apple specifically, in a clickbaity way.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#65
post #29

As expected, I see comments here like "Avoiding sh overcomplicates this." It's true. I found the shell-avoiding instructions no better, and possibly worse, than shell commands. But: what's sauce for the end user goose is sauce for the developer gander. Developers are users. Give developers good visual tools. Sadly I don't think there is a visual front end to git,, for example, that is any good among the handful I hav…

This may be a backwards way to go about it, especially with an end goal of learning Git, but I feel that having learned Mercurial first helped me to more easily move to Git. Ultimately, it was using BitBucket's Mercurial repositories, and then Atlassian stating they were discontinuing Mercurial that forced me to jump to Git. Wanting to keep my Mercurial history forced me to learn parts of Git that I otherwise probably never would have touched. It seems Git has (at least for the present and near future) won the SCM wars for popularity. Working with mostly front end developers unfamiliar with code tools made me the go to guy at work, so I had no choice but to learn as much as I could about handling conflicts, as well as things most people rarely think about like a project's .gitignore and .gitattributes

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#66
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you teach a course that requires Python" "Many of these students have not used the command line." I'd suggest that we are failing to teach students learning to code, the basics of how to use computers. Pre-requisite should be a class on how to use the command line.

I thought a class of entirely non-tech art students how to use the commandline to run their python code within an hour and that includes distractions like people using multiple different operating systems and explai ing how paths work on each. Tech inclined students get the gist of the whole thing in less than 15 minutes. The CLI is literally just: You write a command and a thing happens. That isn't a thing that peop…

If anything I think a pure CLI environment would be easier for a lot of people than the incomprehensible skeumorphism-less jumble of controls that a lot of GUIs have turned into. Everything is built in text and done one command at a time, so there's much less mystery compared to trying to figure out what's even a button or not.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#67
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the kids the author is talking about aren't going to ever code for a living - they're going to code to get their job done. It's a very different mindset.

By that logic... we might as well stop teaching math because kids are never going to become mathematicians.

are you thinking arithmetic, trigonometry, geometry, analysis or statistics?

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anaconda (and miniconda) is a very good solution if you need a container-like environment. I can easily go back to old projects with different python versions and do maintenance in them with no hassle.

pyproject.toml is a better solution

Does it handle binary dependencies and Python ABI changes well? Does it isolate them from almost the entire operating system? Conda does those.

Conda packages compiled such that the search paths of the binaries are not using the OS's (which why the Linux DE Qt theme doesn't work for Spyder).

Conda also comes with well optimized binaries for high performance compute which is absolutely a must for modern data science.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#69
> 10. What Changes When You Are Free

> You will not be forced to work inside something known as a “virtual environment.”

Oof, this terrible advice cancels out an otherwise reasonable post. Beginners who don't know what they're doing are the last people who should be `pip install -r requirements.txt`-ing into the system Python the way this article is recommending. That's not only going to make working on multiple projects nearly impossible (especially for the kind of beginning students who get recommended Anaconda, which are almost always the Data Science-y crowd using NumPy, Pandas, Scikit, etc, which are notoriously finicky with version conflicts), but it stands a good chance of breaking other Python-based system utilities in completely opaque ways. This sort of advice can fubar a naive user's entire workflow.

I know virtualenvs suck to explain to people, but in my opinion it needs to be done before you ever tell them about `pip install`.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#70
post #29

As expected, I see comments here like "Avoiding sh overcomplicates this." It's true. I found the shell-avoiding instructions no better, and possibly worse, than shell commands. But: what's sauce for the end user goose is sauce for the developer gander. Developers are users. Give developers good visual tools. Sadly I don't think there is a visual front end to git,, for example, that is any good among the handful I hav…

Wish there was something like magit outside of emacs that I could recommend to people.

tig?
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