Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Finance, Scientific Users Get ActivePython Updates

Posted by kdawson on from the snakes-on-a-filing dept.

jcasman sends along this clip from PCWorld: "ActiveState has added three open source mathematics libraries to its ActivePython Python distribution that might interest financial and scientific computing markets, the company announced Thursday. The packages are being added, in part, to anticipate the demand that may arise from new proposed rules for the US financial community brought about by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. ... In April, the government agency posted a set of proposed rules for handling asset-backed securities that called for financial firms to disclose, along with their prospectus filings, the source code of the programs that generated the filings, as rendered in Python. The government agency will be accepting input about the proposed rule until August 2. The three libraries that are being added to the ActivePython package are NumPy, SciPy, and matplotlib."

2 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Does Not Work with Most IDEs! by SeriouslyNoClue · · Score: 5, Funny

    Okay so I'm the lead Microsoft certified developer at a Fortune 500 company. I have to get this crappy software integrated with our project that is running as a Win32 application by the end of the month and so I downloaded the packages and dragged and dropped them into Microsoft Visual Studio. Then I created a VB file that basically calls SciPy.getSECReport(somedata) and nothing happens. I get some "Error Method or data member not found" even though the stuff I downloaded was unzipped and dragged right into the rest of my libraries in my WIN32 directory.

    Oh and I also tried double clicking the packages and nothing happens ... as well as dragging and dropping the excel files onto the packages (I'm not an idiot, I've tried everything). I even went to SourceForge to find documentation on this crap and there is nothing. Nothing! Can someone help me figure this crap out? It's impossible to use, the open source nuts have made it so it isn't streamlined and integrated with Windows. I mean, I'm a pretty talented hacker (MSCD and everything) and this just goes to show how crappy open source can be.

    Will someone please rewrite this in Visual Basic so I can do my job?

  2. Not free, however by osvenskan · · Score: 5, Informative

    TFA and TFS fail to mention that SciPy, Numpy and Matplotlib have been added only to the Business, Enterprise, and OEM Editions of ActivePython. The Community Edition (the only one that's free) doesn't contain these libraries.

    http://www.activestate.com/activepython