Pity the plight of the poor peripatetic pythonista

The senior management at Casa Snowy has taken the office over this weekend researching his trip to Hong Kong next weekend. So I have been relegated to using the dining table and my laptop rather than the proper keyboard and 24" monitor I normally use.

I've recently started to use Pycharm as my IDE for Python, as its debugging facilities suit my tastes more than Spyder. (They're both very good, just different).

Now as ever, all the projects I am working on at the moment are stored under subversion on the server. So working on them should be as simple as pointing Pycharm at the appropriate network share and away we go. Now I really was not intending this post to be a rant. But...

One of Python's great strengths is its open-source background. So the fact that no individual or corporation owns Python is one of the secrets of its success. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly Python is available on pretty much any platform you are even likely to use, from a Raspberry Pi to the largest supercomptuer. Secondly, in addition to the standard libraries which come with "standard" Python as downloaded from python.org, there is a whole ecosystem of freely available libraries for more specialised stuff. For example the sublime numpy/scipy for number crunching, ReportLab for producing great looking PDFs, astropy for performing all manner of astronomical calculations and OpenCV for computer vision applications.

These are written and maintained by specialsts in their particular fields, and many thousands of pythonistas worldwide are profoundly grateful for their expertise and knowledge. However, herein lies a problem. Some packages, for example numpy/scipy are fantastically well maintained. Others less so. So, for example, there are still some packages which haven't quite made it over the line to Python 3, e.g. (at the time of writing) OpenCV. Now, there are instructions out there as to how to build such things manually from source. But I'd hoped we had now got to the stage where such things are required. I'm lazy. I just want to be able to do a

$ sudo apt-get install blah

or a

$sudo pip install blah

But these problems are a mere bagatelle compared with the egregious mucking-about I have had this afternoon as I tried to get Pycharm working cleanly. First it wouldn't recognise my SVN version control system. I spent much of last weekend attempting to get geopandas working on a couple of Windows systems, with limited success due to the lack of a Microsoft DLL, complete with a "help" page on the Microsoft website which managed to be both smug and utterly useless.

Today has been spent uninstalling, reinstalling and rebooting as I have attempted to overcome various strange, subtle interactions between 32-bit and 64-bit applications. I know that eventually this will all just work, but this really does seem to be a problem peculiar to the Microsoft universe: on Linux, MacOS and everything else stuff just works. Why on earth does it have to be so difficult in the Microsoft universe?

Anyway, after several hours of messing about, downgrading everything to 32-bit, finally it works. But what a palaver.