"the following is a conversation with travis oliphant one of the most impactful programmers and data scientists ever he created numpy scipy and anaconda numpai formed the foundation of tensor-based mac..."

"what was the first computer program you've ever written do you remember whoa that's a good question i think it was in fourth grade just a simple uh loop in basic basic basic on an atari 800 atari 400 ..."

"in c um but i haven't done much in pascal just that ap computer science course now sorry for the romanticized question but when did you first fall in love with programming oh man good question i think..."

"so what not the type of ti yeah the timex sinclair was one of the very first it was a cheap cheap like i think it was well it was still expensive but it was 2k of memory we got the 16k add-on pack but..."

"and so that's always kind of been the draw kind of coupled with the mathematics did you ever see the computer as like an extension of your mind like something able to achieve not till later okay yeah ..."

"believe that language limits or expands your thinking uh there are some languages that actually lead you to certain thought processes yeah like uh so i speak russian fluently and that's certainly uh a..."

"that the story does a lot of the work but there's a bunch of things that are untranslatable certainly the poetry is not translatable i actually have a few conversations coming up offline and also in t..."

"there's a lot of genius out there that we miss and it's sort of sort of fortunate when it when it bubbles up into something that we can understand or process there's a lot we miss so i tend to lean to..."

"something and encounter python and because python had an array had two things that made me not filtered away because i was filtering a bunch of stuff as yorick i looked at yorick i looked at a few oth..."

"yeah it will continue for many years i think as it builds more and more and more abstractions yes i often think about you know we have we have a world that's built on these abstractions that were they..."

"would say a few peculiar things about python so maybe compared to pearl compared to some of the other languages so there's no braces yeah so you space is used indentation i should say is used as part ..."

"what i really liked is many programming languages really demand a lot of you and you can get a lot you know you do a lot if you learn it but python enables you to do a lot without demanding a lot of y..."

"first language to understand that it was in the 60s right the challenge of apl is apl had very dense not only glyphs like new characters new glyphs they even had a new keyboard because to produce thos..."

"individual numbers in the n-dimensional array you can think of it as an object in itself and all of a sudden this world can open up now you're saying matlab and apl were like the early c i don't know ..."

"what was your favorite feature of python do you remember like what yeah it's so interesting to linger on like the what what really makes you connect with the language i'm not sure it's obvious to intr..."

"came out but guido was very open to users and one of the sets of users were people like jim hugin and david asher and paul dubois and conrad hinson these were people that were on the main list and the..."

"really my baby what is it uh what was its goal what is its goal how does it work yeah fantastic so scipy was effectively here i'm using python to do stuff that i previously used matlab to use and i wa..."

"i'll just start this project and so in 99 98 was when i first started to write libraries for python particularly when i fell in love with python 98 i thought well there's just a few things missing lik..."

"modules you end up having to think about so it's harder when i was just in python i could just think about mri and high-level writing but i could do that and that kind of i liked it i found that to be..."

"wrench cut integration to python and making an ordinary digital equation solver and then releasing that as a package so we could call od pack i think i called it then quad pack and then i just made th..."

"that's um i would say i was inspired i'd been inspired by linux i've been inspired by you know linus linus and him making his code available and i was starting to use linux at the time and i went this..."

"a few folks now that don't program like on the creative side and the video side the audio side and because my whole life is running on scripts i have to try to get them to i'm have now the task of tea..."

"that's a huge responsibility and ultimately has to do with the amazon one-click buy like how how frictionless can you make the early steps frictionless is actually really key to growing any community ..."

"hard drive he did some kernel programming to to make the hard drive work i mean not programming but modification to the kernel so i could actually hard drive working i i love that aspect of it i was a..."

"ode solver and so that's but i actually did that it doesn't happen at the same time that's why it kind of what you're working on and what you're interested in they're coinciding i was definitely scrat..."

"use the tools thinking about what i want to go from here there was a company there's a guy actually eric jones and travis vott they were two friends who founded a company called nthot it's here in aus..."

"vision of scipy was to have plotting was to have you know replied you know the rebel environment and kind of a whole really a whole data environment um that you could then install and get going with a..."

"and we have to come up with different approaches so sci-fi came out officially in 2001 was the first release most the time i remember the days of getting that release ready it was a windows installer ..."

"okay so that that's i left i've got the mayo clinic graduated wrote my thesis using sci-fi wrote you know there's there's images that were created now the plotting tool i used was something from yoric..."

"he released in 2001. about the same time that scipy came out and it was separate library separate install use numeric sci-fi use numeric and so scipy you know 2001 released scipy and then m-thot creat..."

"right and there's also culture around matlab as much because i've talked to a few folks math works great it's my life yeah i mean there's just a culture they try really hard but it's just there's this..."

"it really was i'm actually i'm embarrassed for educational system that they could let me and i was valedictorian in my high school class and i did super well in college and like academically i did gre..."

"they'll they want their economic friends they want their economist to back them up right or to to be there to be their magicians like the magicians in pharaoh's court right the people that are going t..."

"money is just a bartering tool right so this is the first time i've encountered any of this concept right and the fact that oh this is actually really critical like it's so critical to our prosperity ..."

"that was actually a so we thought about several things one is we wanted plotting we wanted interactive environment we wanted good documentation these are things we knew we wanted the reality is those ..."

"set i mean that's one of the some of the greatest teachers do that yeah and i agree and that was kind of what was inspiring me but but you know you also have to i i cannot say i was uh i was articulat..."

"teaching so that that entered scipy's world in terms of we always understood that there's a didactic aspect of sci-fi kind of how do you take the knowledge and then produce it the challenge we had was..."

"luhongza is his name great guy he wrote a bunch of stuff for iterative iterative linear algebra like got into writing some of the iterative literary algebra uh tools that are currently there in sci-fi..."

"goes on you're basically creating a thing which enables science in the 21st century right um maybe don't emphasize that so much in your for your tenure right it illustrates some of the challenges yeah..."

"went in the first documentation for numpy for numeric sorry this is paul dubois david asher connor hinson and myself i got credit because i wrote this chapter which is all the c api of numeric all the..."

"possible and it's extremely helpful and there's a willingness there yeah but but but the challenge is there's usually not a willingness to fund it yeah there's not a willingness to you know like i was..."

"practically this is what one person actually could do uh and actually build because that is important because you can get over your skis yeah you can definitely get over your skis and i had in fact th..."

"who don't know maybe you can elaborate yeah numpy i guess the vision in the narrowest sense is to have this object that represents n-dimensional arrays and like at any level of abstraction you want bu..."

"goal of backward compatibility these other communities which if you didn't have that you'd do something different which is instructive because a lot of things are there you know what is that there for..."

"that helped absolutely helped it makes me wonder in a philosophical like looking at human civilization as one object it makes me wonder how we can copy and paste travis's in the circle well in some as..."

"better off how do we make more of west west mckinney like west mckinney was critical to the success of python because of his creation of pandas which is the roots of that were all the way back in uh a..."

"coaster and then 2006 to 2009 and then i've been floored by the by what it's done like i had i knew it would help i didn't have no idea how much it would help right so and it has to do with again the ..."

"thing i mean there's a few other competitors i guess but python i think really really took over i agree there's a lot of stories here that are kind of during this journey because this is sort of the s..."

"called my friend eric here who had his company was going i said hey could i join you and start this trend and and he would at that time they were using sci-fi a lot they were trying to get clients and..."

"that and we need that flame going and um it's the same thing as exactly as you said it has the same kind of elements like the open source community does and but then if you like the reason i stepped a..."

"years 2007 2007. so you were still so no i was just emerging just right one thing i've done i've done it's worth mentioning because it emphasized the exploratory nature of my thinking at the time i sa..."

"there was actually a lot of people like no it's fine you know you can charge for a book that's no big deal we know that's a way you can you can try to make money around open source so so what i did wh..."

"fact that paypal existed and had a way to make to get the money the distribution was simple this is pre-amazon book stuff so it was just published in a website it was the popularity of sci-fi emerging..."

"excited by a number of things that steps in from that like so i came here worked at nthot for four years uh graciously you know eric made me president and we started to work closely together we actual..."

"as possible like they didn't they tried i mean it was not just because it was just because the business aspect so and i wanted to build a company that could do that could get venture funding right bet..."

"actually have python when you add number plus better typing could actually be a uh you'd smooth out a lot of rough edges but there's already there's like but are you talking about from the perspective..."

"that tangent briefly is you have pi torch and other library like tensorflow that basically tried to mimic uh yeah like you've created a sort of platonic form basically yeah exactly well the problem wa..."

"labs uh it's not unifying all the arrays it's creating an api that is unified um so we do care about this and trying to try to work through it actually the chance to go and meet with the tensorflow te..."

"yeah innovative and then maybe on the infrastructure right uh whatever however you define infrastructure right maybe it's nice to have controversial exactly i agree and i think but it was interesting ..."

"is reasonable but um they bolted it on facebook did too like facebook had their own c plus library for doing inference and they also had the same you know reaction they had to do this one big differen..."

"happy i lean that way too totally but then you have to find the right date but it's a balance yeah it's because you can lean to the hackers and run out of money yeah exactly exactly which has been som..."

"really nice actually especially given uh what microsoft has since done for the open source community yes i think they're doing well i really like some of the stuff they've been doing they're still wor..."

"was to get it into python 3 and maybe be part of python so we talked about that that's cool about that approach right i would have loved to be a fly in the world that was a that was good and over over..."

"science for everybody we kind of have this early on desire to oh maybe we should be pushing programming to more people so he had this populist notion i guess or populist sense um so learn that there's..."

"something else it just means assignment so he stepped down over this what do you think about the pressure of leadership some of the you mentioned the letter i wrote in umpire at the time that was a ha..."

"are we pushing that why are we promoting that so deeply let's assume friend until proven otherwise yes yeah so because you have such a fascinating mind and all this let me just ask you these questions..."

"was it was but it also illustrated a truism that you know it's when you have inertia when you have a pop when you have a group of people using something it's really hard to move them away from it you ..."

"exactly maybe this is essential part of it because i do think about that in terms of i currently have an incubator for open source startups like what i'm trying to do right now is create the environme..."

"tesla autopilot team and uh he's also one of the most like legit uh programmers uh i know it's like he builds stuff from scratch a lot and that's how he builds intuition about how a problem works he j..."

"broadly in numpy but also on these like specific weird quirks of like a single function yep so on that point if you use a numpy math function on a scalar it's going to be slower than using a python fu..."

"could be faster just using python straight up python see but also and then this is the so sorry to introduce there's the fundamental questions when you look at the long arc of history it's very possib..."

"that you can write functions using all of it it has implicit looping right so you don't worry about this n-dimensional for loop with you know four loops four four statements you just say oh big four-d..."

"if i can do a one-dimensional array against a two-dimensional array and have it make sense well that's what numpy does is it challenges you to reformulate rethink your problem yes as a multi-dimension..."

"compilation step to install sci-fi it takes about two hours if you have many machines maybe you can get it down to one hour but to compile those libraries takes about takes a while you don't want to d..."

"it does everything with x-rays yeah so it is it's powerful order dictionaries came later but it is very very powerful it took me a little while coming from just the array programming entirely to under..."

"one thing i love about open source is it's global it's multinational like there aren't national boundaries one of the challenges with business and open source is the fact that business is national lik..."

"reflection of the reality of what people are well if you look at the major power centers that are leading to something like cyber war in the next few decades it's united states it's russia and china r..."

"right no i think that's good that's good prediction nations that code together uh don't go to war yeah they don't go to war together that's that's a hope right that's one of the philosophical hopes bu..."

"what is uh number what is its goal how does it work great yeah yes that's what the argument and the reality was people would write high-level code and use compiled code but there's still user story us..."

"worked on a scalar like you could make a like the classic case was a simple function and if then statement in it so uh sine x over x function sync function if x equals zero return one otherwise do sin..."

"that's a different topic but i've learned to you know raise money from friends family and fools as they say and that's a good line oh that's a good sign but you know so i we're trying to do something ..."

"from the perspective of wanting to produce a vectorized improvement they were from perspective of speeding up the runtime of python which is fundamentally hard because python allows for some construct..."

"and and have them use for numpy arrays like the needed support numpy race and so uh how does it work you have a comment within python that tells to do like how do you help out compiler yeah so there i..."

"the subset it would actually compile was small and so if you wrote python code and said to the way it worked did you write a function and you say at jit use decorators so decorators just these little ..."

"python but then the whole goal of number is to translate python byte code to llvm and so lvm actually does the code generation in fact a lot of times they'd say yeah it's super easy to write a compile..."

"in language because one uh every browser has a javascript jet it does real-time compilation of the javascript to machine code for people who don't know jet is just in time compilation thank you yeah j..."

"targeted gpus so we had the very first cuda jit and the very first jit compiler that in 2013 for 13 you could run not just a vue funk on cpu but a u function gpus and it was awesome automatically para..."

"friends family and fools so uh anaconda is yet another so there's a company but there's also a project correct that is exceptionally impactful uh in in terms of uh for many reasons but one of which is..."

"not pass by the python community that we had a ways to translate your data science to the web so those are the two kind of technical areas we thought oh we'll build products in this space and that was..."

"on some interesting projects super excited about what came out of our energy there like a lot did so what are some of the interesting things dask number bokeh conda uh there was a data shader panel ho..."

"cases of python plotting yeah but there's a difference between static plots versus interactive plots versus i'm an end user i just want to write a simple you know pandas started the idea of here's a d..."

"like i said with scipy sci-fi was a distribution masculine library and he said talk to me talking about compiler issues and trying to get the stuff shipped and the fact that people can use your librar..."

"pause real quick and and uh can you say what is pi pi the python package index like this whole story yeah of packaging in python yeah that's what i'm going to get to actually this is exactly the journ..."

"the in the difference today conda always was a user i'm i'm going to use python to do data science i'm going to use python to do something how do i get this installed it was always focused on that so ..."

"gonna do it all right the origin story right there all right you said okay you said to do this ourselves so at the same time people did start to work on the packaging story in python it just took a li..."

"don't do it i'm like wait okay so now we're not making changes to a library because of the installation problem that it'll cause for end users okay there's a problem with pac there's a problem with in..."

"neighboring design question is do you also create a package manager that spans multiple programming languages correct exactly that was the world we faced and we decided to go multiple operating system..."

"also incredible this was incredible exactly i don't know who did that but they did a great job a lot of people in inria a lot of people a lot of european contributors um andreas there's some andreas u..."

"times pip is mentioned over conda is like 100x to one correct correct so they just haven't that was increasing it wasn't true early because pip didn't exist like conda came first so but that's like th..."

"of a package you can actually have different compilation versions of a package so not just the version's different but oh this is compiled with these optimizations so kana does have an answer to those..."

"empowering people governance around it and there was and what happened with khan in the early days pip emerged and we did we did do some good things condo forge the kind of forage community is sort of..."

"things with pip and docker right so especially with the web development community that part of it again is this is the there's a lot of different kind of developers in the python ecosystem and there's..."

"have at quansite a portion of the money goes directly to quansite labs to help keep it funded so we've gotten several mechanisms we keep quansite labs funded and currently so i'm really excited about ..."

"so that's one big area have you gotten a chance to chat with andre and elon about partic because like no i would love to by the way i have not but i'd love to i just saw their tesla ai days uh video y..."

"open teams i'm super excited about open teams because it's one of the i mentioned my idea for investing directly in open source so that's a concept called ferro ss but one of the things we when we sta..."

"fascinating brother so you use the power of the organic formation of teams in the open source community and then like naturally that leads to a business that can make there are so many yeah correct it..."

"they're constantly given products from the from enterprise software here's open source lead enterprise software now i buy it and they have to stitch it together into a solution open source is fantasti..."

"transmission layer between companies and open source communities producing enterprise software solutions like eventually we want to like today we're taking on sas and matlab and tools that we know we ..."

"enterprise software um it's we're still early like this idea just percolated over the past year as we've kind of grown quan sight and realize the extensibility of it uh we just finished in our seed ro..."

"they're doing and and even work alongside them uh you know as a consultant uh using my using open source and trying how do we make this work inside of our large organization some of it is actually for..."

"google ads or am i spent on facebook ads or do i not hire a content creator and say like like there's an operational aspect to that that some that you have to be the cmo right or the ceo you have to g..."

"point is taking the big risk that's a great being the first one to risk yeah and there's an aspect of data observation from that risk right that's that's that's you i think because shared what they're..."

"and to me the incredible maybe wrong in the case of irobot i don't know but to me when you're talking about engineering systems it's really nice to show off the magic of the engineering and the softwa..."

"that realization there's this halo effect right and also influences your general marketing i interesting for some stupid reason i do have a platform and it seems that the reason i have a platform many..."

"there are times in my life i'd probably answer this even better than i hope maybe give an answer today because i've thought about this at numerous times like right now i've spent on so much time recen..."

"know defining the inputs and outputs to finding what you want to get done um even just talking about that in like writing down before you write code just what are you trying to accomplish and being ve..."

"everything you need what lessons do you draw from you having created numpy and scipy like in service of sort of answering the question of what it takes to be a great programmer and giving advice to pe..."

"this is the right approach the right thing to do with scipy it was like oh yeah the world needs libraries in python clearly python is popular enough with enough influential people that to start and it..."

"inertial inertia energy that just doesn't change that quickly so let me ask a silly question but uh you know like you said you're focused on the sales side of things currently but you know back when y..."

"concept and uh also of course github is uh and then git lab make git definitely consumable um but that came later did you ever touch lisp at all like what were you what yeah emotional feelings about t..."

"learning right and you know i've spent a lot of time learning right other people spend a lot more time but i've spent a lot of time learning i mean my whole goal was to get a phd because i loved schoo..."