[Numpy-discussion] Proposal to accept NEP-18, array_function protocol (original) (raw)

Marten van Kerkwijk m.h.vankerkwijk at gmail.com
Wed Aug 29 10:43:55 EDT 2018

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 9:53 AM Matthew Rocklin <mrocklin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On the backwards compatibility: from an astropy perspective, I would expect that the introduction of _arrayfunction_ implies a guarantee that the functionality it provides will remain,

My guess is that you wouldn't have this expectation if Numpy released this feature with explicit "Experimental" warnings attached to it. In that case astropy might just wait before adopting it until that label was dropped. Projects that were more risk-friendly would then take on the burden of trying it out, working out some kinks, and then hopefully in a version or two the "Experimental" label would be dropped and astropy would step in and adopt it more safely. Well, I guess I'll be proving Nathaniel right: I would definitely start using array_function in astropy - not being able to concatenate Quantity and other instances which use it has been a long-standing pain.

I do think that even for an experimental feature one should be allowed to expect that there will continue to be a way provided by numpy to access the same functionality, i.e., once we allow people to do np.concatenate(list-of-mimics), I think we should consider ourselves committed to providing some way to continue doing that - the experimental tag should only imply that we are not committed to the precise method with which that can be achieved. (Of course, I can be a bit more cavalier than most, since I am hopeful I can help ensure that some method will continue to be present; indeed, the same happened for array_ufunc - I had already written a numpy_ufunc implementation in Quantity and when that stalled in numpy, I picked up and finished the array_ufunc code that Nathan had written.)

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