You are reinforcing my point in a way. If you look at the nltk site's docs on installing on Windows [1], you see there isn't even any mention of anaconda. In f

You are reinforcing my point in a way. If you look at the nltk site's docs on installing on Windows [1], you see there isn't even any mention of anaconda. In fact, there is basically a set of links asking you to go and figure it out for yourself. Either the maintainers of the NLTK project are not aware that there is a better way (using anaconda like you suggest) or they are aware but haven't seen any good reason to update their documentation. So why do they (and broadly the 'ecosystem') not update their docs to be more Windows friendly, or to even develop their software so as to be pain free to install on Windows in the first place? That is the ecosystem effect at play here. How many people are likely to stumble on to your comment when they search "install nltk on windows"? On second thoughts, with my double quotes and all, now they might :-) [1] http://www.nltk.org/install.html http://www.nltk.org/install.html