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Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

paulromer.net

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Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#251

Post by jampekka »

dumbo-octopus wrote: post #236
jampekka wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Node.js has (or at least had before the ES6 mess) the sanest and best thought out package manager out there.

NPM’s original sin was making package installation and general management so painless that folks installed micro packages for everything. Can’t really fault the software for that. The issue was, as you say, the introduction of ESM. It used to be that you required modules one way and one way only (yes there was AMD for advanced use cases, but it was an add-on), then people felt the need to “standardize” that, no we ha…

I don't see what's wrong with micropackages.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#252

Post by exe34 »

ok123456 wrote: post #245
exe34 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, because installing random python libraries to system python on Debian never broke any system.

Use poetry/Debian. Standard Python tooling is acceptable in 2024; using some busted 3-plus-year-old "supported" environment with a package manager with a really busted constraint solver, which doesn't even come bundled with compilers, is unnecessary.

I've installed plenty of compilers using conda - how long ago was it that you last tried it? even ROS is available in conda now, instead of requiring specific obsolete versions of Ubuntu.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#253

Post by regularfry »

bmitc wrote: post #243
regularfry wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issues are with one particular facet of poor design and management. The rest of it is manageable, if distasteful, and worth the effort for the ecosystem (in general).

There really is more than one particular face of poor design in Python. I honestly remain confused why people use and love Python so much. It very much says something.

Oh, there are many. There are just comparatively few that you can point at as being quite as directly responsible for dev misery as thé packaging system.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#255

Post by bitfilped »

Why not teach students how to work with their .zshrc file and become better computer users? I've never understood the aversion in academia to teaching people how computers work. This could be "fixed" with a simple sed line or `vim/emacs/nano ~.zshrc` rather than a multi step process of dragging files around and futzing around in the UI. I see this all the time in higher ed, so much wasted time and effort coming up with long complicated procedures that appeal to people unwilling to learn the basics of computers rather than just teaching effective computing usage. Especially now in an era where computers are a tool almost everyone needs to know how to use to succeed in the workforce, it just doesn't make sense. Learning how to be effective in Unix should be a required 100 level class for almost every major by now.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#256

Post by defrost »

mistrial9 wrote: post #240
defrost wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other two second searches: Lab Leak is Real, Ivermectin cures COVID, 9-11 was an inside job. LLM's give you what you want to hear. Now get some live quotes, both for and against, from actual working mathematicians. There are a lot of definitive conclusions about lines | planes | surfaces that "best fit", by many metrics, sampled data, etc.

this has nothing to do with LLMs at all.. you are uninformed about the old feud between mathematics and statistics so you claim this is not true. anyway, on reflection, the word "is" does not fit here.. statistics and mathematics are not disjoint, but no, statistics is not a field of mathematics.. ask around among people with serious graduate studies in mathematics and they will fill you in.. Maybe it overlaps into t…

> this has nothing to do with LLMs at all

They are plugged into the backend of many search engines these days and they excel at picking out the nature of the pattern | result that a questioner wants and feeding back what they want to hear.

> ask around among people with serious graduate studies in mathematics and they will fill you in

I checked in with Terence Tao who I first met at an Australian math club get together in the mid 1980s .. he pointed out his 2007 paper on The Dantzig selector (a novel statistical estimator for linear regression) and seems fine accepting statistics as part of mathematics.

I'd hate to cite myself given my rather dull work, but I feel that Terrence surely qualifies as someone "with serious graduate studies in mathematics" given his Fields Medal and UCLA professorship and all that jazz.

Do you have someone more qualified in mind?

    Emmanuel Candes, Terence Tao "The Dantzig selector: Statistical estimation when p is much larger than n," The Annals of Statistics, Ann. Statist. 35(6), 2313-2351, (December 2007)

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#257

Post by VHRanger »

jampekka wrote: post #251
dumbo-octopus wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NPM’s original sin was making package installation and general management so painless that folks installed micro packages for everything. Can’t really fault the software for that. The issue was, as you say, the introduction of ESM. It used to be that you required modules one way and one way only (yes there was AMD for advanced use cases, but it was an add-on), then people felt the need to “standardize” that, no we ha…

I don't see what's wrong with micropackages.

Massive attack surface. That's true as a security risk, but also as a dependency risk (eg. left-pad).

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#258

Post by mistrial9 »

defrost wrote: post #256
mistrial9 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this has nothing to do with LLMs at all.. you are uninformed about the old feud between mathematics and statistics so you claim this is not true. anyway, on reflection, the word "is" does not fit here.. statistics and mathematics are not disjoint, but no, statistics is not a field of mathematics.. ask around among people with serious graduate studies in mathematics and they will fill you in.. Maybe it overlaps into t…

> this has nothing to do with LLMs at all They are plugged into the backend of many search engines these days and they excel at picking out the nature of the pattern | result that a questioner wants and feeding back what they want to hear. > ask around among people with serious graduate studies in mathematics and they will fill you in I checked in with Terence Tao who I first met at an Australian math club get togeth…

hah! certainly respect to Terence Tao and his Fields Medal (!!!!) .. probably not worth beating into the ground .. '-)

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#259

Post by xgdgsc »

zem wrote: post #189
zelphirkalt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matlab is a categorical loss due to its proprietary character, R debatable, Julia, maybe yes. Octave, while at least not proprietary, still surely not, if the task is anything but some matrix multiplication or matrices using program.

julia has an unacceptable overhead when running small programs. it works well for longer running workloads or extended interactive sessions, but for learning you want to be able to write and execute small scripts without feeling the perceptible lag every time. google up "time to first plot" for more on this.

It' s quite acceptable with 1.10.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#260

Post by promer »

hwgern wrote: post #211
promer wrote: post #155

I appreciate all the comments. I agree with most, even when they disagree with me or each other. I especially agree with the questions several people raise: What it is that we should teach? In which order? I think there is a consensus about what a student should end up knowing. Even if they are not going to become developers, they should be able to edit text files; they should be able to run commands from the termina…

I agree with most of your "Environment as Code" post. Virtual environments are overhyped and even experienced developers frequently have to fix their venv or repair their conda install. You get to depend on a tool that's not necessary and distracts from the original purpose of using the software. On Unix, it is even trivial to have parallel installations. Build two pythons: ./configure --prefix=/home/foo/a && make &&…

I agree. It would be better if people understood the costs and benefits of virtual environments and used costs and benefits to guide decisions about how and when to use them.

The general observation I would add is that these change with the level of experience of the person writing the code. I found it helpful and harmless to avoid them when I was experimenting. Now, I use them automatically.

I know that it made people angry, but I think it was reasonable to say that if someone does not know how to edit a file and is not comfortable using the terminal, they are not ready for virtual environments.

Re separation, another option is the one I recommend in the "Environment as Code" post: Right now, I'd suggest installing

- Python3.12

- Python3.11

- Python3.10

Then use edits to `.zprofile` to specify which will be used in any terminal session. It does require the use of an editor to make changes to `.zprofile`, which is where the official versions put the lines that add things to the user PATH. I think it is very helpful to get people familiar with how profiles set PATH for any terminal session and how easy it is to control by commenting out or commenting back in lines in `.zprofile`.

Later, one can introduce them to `.zshrc`.

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