What is new in IPython 1.0 | Hacker News Reader

What is new in IPython 1.0

ipython.org

175 pointsrunarberg45 comments

Please, this is an alpha. There are still things to polish even after a long week of hacking all together in berkley. Try not Tweet and CO. that it has been released, warn people that this is an alpha. But we gladly accept feedback (and fixes) on bugs and docs. Yes it will be on PiPy soon, but only when ready.

Telling to everyone to read the release when it is not done will make more harm than good as people continue to visit dev-doc afterward, and the current version is/will be inaccurate because of last minutes changes.

Thanks a lot for your enthousiasme.

Please note it as such in the release notes until it is finally released, like LLVM and GCC do.

Will do, but usually the link contains `dev` prefix, the root of the doc says `1.0.0a`. We never link directly from main web site to dev doc; You have to manually enter the dev docs. It is still a lot of protection. We'll try to add a prefix on every pages.

I apologize, I'm new to HN, and not familiar with customs, good practice, and such. Perhaps I should have included ´[dev-doc]´ or ´[alpha]´ in the title.

Very cool, I'm looking forward to checking this out. Support for injecting HTML, javascript, etc. into the notebook and even loading custom css & javascript sounds great. I suspect we'll start seeing some really slick looking notebooks with pretty themes.

Woah, support for inject HTML, etc. sounds very interesting, and seems like a big deal.

On another point: I'm increasingly intrigued by the idea of having something like IPython (or perhaps, IPython itself) be used as your command-line shell. Right now it's possible, but in a bit of a long-winded way. I think this is a matter worth looking a little more into.

> Right now it's possible, but in a long-winded way

How is it long-winded? Basic operations such as cd, ls, etc., all work inside IPython.

Also, try envoy[0] for subprocesses.

https://github.com/kennethreitz/envoy

Those very basic operations work, but it's not feasible yet to use it exclusively as a shell and be able to do anything moderately complex without getting fancy with subprocesses and so on. Though, it's been a while since I used it (2 years) -- have things changed significantly in this time that now make it a good candidate to use as a command-line terminal?

Precede any command by "!" and it sends it to bash, you can use git etc. like this.

Cool, I didn't know this.

However, still I wonder if that's enough. I mean, I can imagine that could get annoying really fast considering ! is a little tough to get to on the keyboard. Maybe a modal switch (a la vim, a mode for full blown shell, a mode with IPython being normal IPython) is a good option.

I really hope something like this eventually works out. Command-line shells seem too much like relics of the past, they can stand to be improved with some of the new UI sensibilities. IPython is one thing I can think of that is poised to fit and interact well with shells.

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/shell.html

Check that out, I think that's along the lines you are thinking.

You can also make a whole cell be in bash with %%bash.

AFAIK any shell command preceded by a "!" works just as you would it expect it to work in your shell.

Last time I checked, that didn't have proper tab completion, and didn't (by default) support any aliases I might have set up. I rely heavily on both.

If you are a pythonista and not using iPython Notebook for exploration... I posit that you are, in fact, doing it wrong. Its soooooo goood.

I upvoted you, but I am ashamed to say that I don't really understand how to use IPython notebooks. Can you recommend a good resource for learning how to use them?

So much of my exploratory work with IPython is to explore the Django models I use in my apps, and I am having trouble seeing what a notebook adds for me.

I would say, just start! It's indispensable for exploratory data analysis for sure.

Good point! I will look more closely at the Notebook site's library of samples. So far it seems like the main reason is to have documented analysis or good plots / calculations for data.

Usually I am looking less at analyzing reams of data, though, and more at the relations between objects. ("What kind of object is User.things? It's a query set, but do we ever have more than one? Do we have any users with no Thing associated?") While notebooks can surely express that, I rarely feel like I need to re-create the asking of the question. Perhaps it is that I have not yet graduated far enough in my explorations of data that a Notebook is the best tool.

I'm going to look more closely at them this week, though. Thank you for the encouragement to do so.

Well, for what you are looking for I would use an IPython session, or perhaps an embedded IPython session. Look at http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/reference.htm...

I use the ipython notebook sometimes, but I almost always use something similar. (In my case, I often use emacs org-mode files to make basic literate program-style documents.)

I keep these things in a dated "Notebook" file, like "Notebook/2013-07", just to hold all my one-offs.

Why do I keep them? Well, often it takes a while for me to set up the particular environment I need. If there's a problem with the calculation for X, I need to load the right data, set up the context for X, run through the individual bits until I see what the issue is.

I save the ipython notebook where I go through all that, and then if I need to go back to the calculation, for example to demonstrate to someone else my example that something has gone wrong, then I can just load up the notebook. If something is supposed to have been fixed, I can load up the notebook and repeat the calculation and see if it works now.

Unlike emacs org-mode, I can easily save the graphs as part of this. ("Look, if I plot the distribution, there's this big extra lump over there. Where's that coming from?")

If I go back to a file, it typically takes me a bit of thought to remember exactly what I was doing there. Once I figure it out again, I add sentence or two of markdown.

It's a useful thing to have around.

> Unlike emacs org-mode, I can easily save the graphs as part of this.

I might be misunderstanding what you're wanting here, but are you looking for something like (R example):

    #+begin_src R :exports both :results graphics :file graph.png
      ...
    #+end_src

Fernando Perez (the force behind IPython) has done several in depth tutorials at various pydata confs... I'd start there.

Watch a good tech talk at x2 speed. I would say most technical talks end up on Youtube and/or Vimeo (or Blip.tv). I remember there was a good one from Pycon..

If the project is notable enough a search like this usually works: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_sort=video_view_count&...

How do you watch a YouTube or Vimeo video at 2x speed? Is there a browser extension or something? I've often wanted to do that.

Well first make sure you're opted into HTML5 beta/playback whatever on Youtube/Vimeo.

A random result from my previous link is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6dLGQw9yFQ

Click the gear icon where you can select the quality. Playback speed should also be there. Sometimes it isn't.

In which case, force it into the popout view by tweaking the URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=H6dLGQw9yFQ

Huzzah. :)

If there's no option, just use keepvid.com or similar and play it with Mplayer. Uses way less CPU too.

http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

with html5 player:

  document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0].playbackRate = 2

Also for flash http://www.enounce.com/myspeed

For a nice list of IPythton notebook examples, see

https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-interes...

Mostly data exploration / scientific computing.

As a heavy numerical python user I've tried and it's cool. But as a heavy vim user I miss the code editing flexibility. My current favorite way to use ipython is through vim's Screenshell plugin.

Emacs has EIN (http://tkf.github.io/emacs-ipython-notebook/); perhaps a vim implementation is possible?

Ok so at your behest I set up a notebook on one of my remote servers and you are right, it's pretty neat. Seems situational though. ipython proper seems a better choice for most stuff no?

Notebooks are very useful for analysing data where you want to create a cleaned-up record of what you've done.

But they have not fixed the embed bug that prevents you from embedding IPython within another IPython session. I find the embedded IPython so useful during debugging. I really wish it could work from within an IPython session.

I'm not familiar with embedding ipython, so maybe I"m way off the mark, but I use ipdb for the use case you're referring to. Works within ipython and all

I should try ipdb. I've been using pdb (which I usually do using postmortem pdb.pm(), after my program crashes). But try out

from IPython import embed; embed()

instead of pdb.set_trace()

It starts a whole IPython interpreter right there with all variables loaded. I like it because I can do inspection, plotting etc etc.

Ah, yeah ipdb has much of the same functionality but not a full-fledged ipython instance, I don't believe.

For reference, the underlying cause is that IPython is written assuming that there will only be one instance of it in a process. Fixing that assumption is on our radar, but to be honest, it's quite low down the list of priorities.

Sounds kind of interesting, but when I go to check it out I find out that IPython 1.0 has not been released yet. Couldn't you have waited to make this post untill it was actually available? You're missing out on installs this way.

This is the documentation for the development version of IPython. I don't think they care that they're "missing out on installs" by releasing documentation about what's changed in version 1.0

However, if you'd like to try out IPython 1.0, it's an open source project. You can checkout the latest code at https://github.com/ipython/ipython

what are the typical releases for ipython? is 1.00a1 supposed to replace 0.13 in pypi?

I suspect they'll wait a few more alpha-beta point releases before updating PyPI, but not sure. Any devs reading?

Yep, it should only become the default version you get from PyPI when it's a final release. I think PyPI/pip can handle pre-release versions without making them the default - in that case, we might put betas up.

They got a grant from the Sloan Foundation several months ago to fund IPython development. It was originally going to be the 0.14 release but after the grant they updated the release roadmap, so now it's 1.0. It will replace 0.13 in pypi, I believe.

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