[pydata-outreach-staff] Laptop setup guide, and questions

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Chang She wrote:

> just curious what problem did you run into setting up Anaconda on 
> windows? is it not just a matter of setting path?

Sorry, yeah, I wasn't entirely clear on that. Let me clarify.

Anaconda on Windows seemed like a mess if you already have a Python 
installed. In that case, this is a question, not an answer: "What happens 
when you run Python?"

If you already set your %PATH% to include the python.org Python, then 
suddenly the presence of two Python interpreters is a bit confusing. It 
means scripts that used to work might no longer work. So I felt it was 
better to steer clear of that.

It was easy enough to write well-tested Windows instructions that work and 
don't take super long to go through, so I stuck with that.

If we want, we can change the instructions to have you use Anaconda; it's 
a fairly reasonable package that distributes basically everything needed, 
even including a compiler, which is very nice.

Mostly I'm interested in avoiding "if"s in the installation guide -- the 
more conditionals there are, the harder things get, because it means if 
someone has a problem at the workshop, we have to ask "Are you using 
Anaconda Python or python.org Python," and I want to avoid questions like 
that where we increase the cognitive burden on attendees through 
sysadmin-type issues, and focus everyone's cognitive burden capacity on 
Pandas itself (or whatever other things they *choose* to think about).

So that's the background and motivation and I'm open to other choices.

-- Ashesh.