[bip] Blog post on bioinformatics and Python

[Andrew Dalke]

On Sep 17, 2008, at 10:04 PM, Ryan Raaum wrote:
> Nonetheless, I would prefer
> that the documentation for that functionality tells me right up front
> in big letters that "This will run slowly if the C extension has not
> been compiled. To test if you are using the C extension or the pure
> python version, import module and run module.is_c()" For that matter,
> you could have the default python version loudly note to stderr that
> it is going to be slow.

Yes, different preferences and beliefs.  I believe
most people will skip reading the documentation if
at all possible, and "it seems to work, just slowly"
is not enough inventive to look in the documentation
as for reasons why.

Performance seems more of a second-hand concern to most
people.  Sort of the dancing bear effect - they are
surprised the program even works to stop and wonder if
it could be faster.


I also hate warning messages to the console.  Running
the OS X version of ipython (which I did yesterday
for the first time) I got:

% ipythonx
CGContextRestoreGState: invalid context

Huh?  That message is effectively meaningless to me.

And in your case, where you package tools with
py2exe, the output won't go anywhere the user can see.

(Okay, with the logging module I can redirect things
but that's a conversation I'm not going to have now.)


				Andrew
				dalke at dalkescientific.com