Hello everyone. What do you think about adding a Python category where we would discuss all things VTK + Python?
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I think that’s a good idea.
+1000
Do you mean a new category for discussing Python wrapping infrastructure, pip/conda packages, etc? Or you would like to separate questions about VTK depending on what language the poster uses the most often for VTK?
For me the first could make sense (although a tag may be more appropriate). The second may be hard to put in practice, because we don’t always know the language preference and it could also result in unnecessary siloing of information.
If the goal is to just see what languages VTK users mostly use a survey might work better. I would be very curious about the result of such survey, because my impression from questions posted on VTK, Slicer, and ITK forums is that the overwhelming majority uses Python. But results may be skewed because maybe C++ users ask less questions.
I am thinking a category for python-specific things. The wrapping infrastructure etc. would definitely fall into that category. I don’t consider the use of VTK from python to be a very python-specific thing. Most of the time, the same issues apply to both C++ and VTK. On the other hand, if you are trying to access the call data of an event from python, that’s a python specific thing. (I didn’t know that it was possible until recently. @dgobbi did a fantastic job there!)
My specific use case is that I want to propose some changes to the dataset_adapter module. I would actually like to propose a new module that lives closer to VTK and makes it easier to interface with numpy and pandas. I couldn’t figure out where to post that. I would like feedback from both users and developers; those that are involved with python.
I agree that Python support infrastructure is a very distinct topic, so it could be moved out to a new category.
However, category makes a very strong divide, it is very high level, kind of corresponds to subcommunities. So, a new category would be probably not justified for discussing this topic. It may be better to standardize on using a python-wrapping or similar tag that would have most of the benefits of a category (forum members can sign up to get notifications, easily get list of related topics, etc) and it would not clutter the forum, could be used in both Support and Development categories, and could help with making the posts visible to more members.
Improving numpy and pandas interface would be great. Moving slightly beyond that with xarray support and coordinate with ITK would be even better. That would ideally allow us to get an image from ITKPython and render it using VTK without loss of metadata or doing complex conversion steps.
Just a quick (slightly off-topic) clarification to this point:
There were several people who worked on this feature. Most of the code (and documentation) were from Jean-Christophe.
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I would be fine with a python tag or something like that. It would be great to hear from a few others though.
By the way, it doesn’t look like I can create categories or tags. I am assuming that this would fall to one of the site maintainers?
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Permission for creating tags is only available above a certain trust level (to avoid proliferation of tags). We can ask @admins to create a new tag if nobody in this discussion has sufficient trust level.
I can create categories/tags.
Tags are nice because they can be combined. For example, “python”+“proposal” in category “Development”.
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I also like tags rather than siloing into categories. Even if I work mostly from C++, I like seeing the posts about Python/Java etc because often I can learn something from those anyway (and occasionally help someone). I subscribe to Support and Development categories.
Tag it is then. Thank you all. @cory.quammen can you create the python tag?
Done. The tag python has been created.