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

[Chang She]

that's reasonable and i definitely get the desire to have as little "except…" or "if…" or "unless…" as possible.
The only reason why I brought up Anaconda is that for people who don't have any Python installed, starting with Anaconda or EPD is a much easier and hassle-free option.

Whatever you think will be easier for the audience is fine with me :)

On Dec 13, 2012, at 1:33 PM, Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org> wrote:

> 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.
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