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I'm asking as someone who is mid level Python & DS experienced and out of real curiosity (not a "mine is better than yours" thought): Could you elaborate what i

I'm asking as someone who is mid level Python & DS experienced and out of real curiosity (not a "mine is better than yours" thought): Could you elaborate what in your opinion makes anaconda superior? I am frequently doing data munging & low level ML things and - so far - I am more happy with the pip side of things as a combination of virtualenv, autoenv [1], pip tools [2], pyup [3] and the rest of the eco system. Standard procedure, takes two minutes and I have a Jupyter notebook up, smartly automated base processes for dependency management, full control of environment variables and can deploy/ integrate this in any other Python setup (if I were to port IPython code to pure Python). Is this more a thing of each his own or am I missing a crucial advantage of Anaconda? [1] https://github.com/kennethreitz/autoenv https://github.com/kennethreitz/autoenv [2] https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools [3] https://github.com/pyupio/pyup https://github.com/pyupio/pyup

joshvm 9y ago
Ease of use. I run outreach events and when you have sporadic internet access, being able to give new programmers an exe to install Python with a load of useful packages is a godsend. Also, it takes a lot of the pain out of setting up a Python environment on Windows when you need funny packages that require compilation (e.g OpenCV). I've been to enough software carpentry talks where people nod and smile, and then promptly ignore the "how to be a responsible developer" advice. They don't care. They just want to run Python and plot some stuff or classify some data without worrying about multiple CLI tools. People seem to accept Anaconda because it comes across as a monolith and it's easier to understand for new programmers than virtualenvs and worrying about pinning pip installs. That said, I don't use Anaconda on Mac or Linux.

joshvm 9y ago

Ease of use. I run outreach events and when you have sporadic internet access, being able to give new programmers an exe to install Python with a load of useful packages is a godsend. Also, it takes a lot of the pain out of setting up a Python environment on Windows when you need funny packages that require compilation (e.g OpenCV). I've been to enough software carpentry talks where people nod and smile, and then promptly ignore the "how to be a responsible developer" advice. They don't care. They just want to run Python and plot some stuff or classify some data without worrying about multiple CLI tools. People seem to accept Anaconda because it comes across as a monolith and it's easier to understand for new programmers than virtualenvs and worrying about pinning pip installs. That said, I don't use Anaconda on Mac or Linux.