IPython User Survey 2013¶

The full responses, and summaries of responses to some questions, are available as a Google Spreadsheet.

Countries¶ 42% of respondents were in the USA, followed by the UK (7.1%) and Germany (6.7%). These numbers are largely similar to the last user survey, two years ago, but the diversity of countries in the ‘tail’ has increased. In total, respondents came from 48 countries (in descending order of frequency): USA, UK, Germany, France, Brazil, Canada, Spain, Argentina, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Australia, Norway, Colombia, Russia, Mexico, Italy, Czech Republic, India, Bermuda, Ireland, Denmark, New Zealand, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Chile, Vietnam, Croatia, Switzerland, Portugal, China, Taiwan, Maldives, Ecuador, Israel, El Salvador, Slovenia, Thailand, Poland, Finland, Belarus, Estonia, Egypt, South Africa, Peru, Greece, Japan See the ‘Countries’ sheet of the results spreadsheet for the cleaned data.

IPython versions¶ We see a rapid changeover - IPython 1.0 was released while the survey was running, and by the end of the survey, more people reported using 1.0 than 0.13, the previous release. Very few people were using older releases, although two people mentioned using the 0.8 series. The survey respondents are probably biased towards people who actively update IPython to newer versions, so we can assume that a greater proportion of the total population of users are on older versions. Nonetheless, the take up rates are encouraging.

IPython components¶ The notebook was the most popular component, with 84% saying they use it, followed by the classic terminal interface (76%). The Qt console was the least used interface (27%). Over half of respondents use pylab (55%). 16% use the parallel computing framework in IPython. Other components that people mentioned include nbconvert, nbviewer, rmagic and traitlets. We should include some of these in future surveys.

Platforms¶ These results were similar to the previous survey. Linux was the most popular operating system (81%), while roughly equal numbers use Windows (34%) and Mac (39%). Of the cloud platforms, only Amazon EC2 has any significant usage, with 6% of respondents. Minor platforms: two people listed Wakari here (others listed it under embedding products). Two people use Microsoft Azure. FreeBSD, AIX, Rackspace and Raspberry Pi were each mentioned once.

Python versions¶ As expected, Python 2.7 is the most widely used release (97%). However, a significant fraction (22%) have also used IPython with Python 3.3. 7% of users still use Python 2.6, and 4% use 3.2 - we will be dropping support for both of these versions in IPython 2.0. Very few are on even older versions.

Projects integrating IPython¶ 59 people (13%) reported using IPython with the Spyder IDE. Anecdotally, we have seen more people using Spyder in Europe than in North America, and the results somewhat support this. Although the US was still the largest single country among users of IPython and Spyder, it accounted for only 20% of the users, less than the 42% from the US in the whole survey. Projects integrating IPython with the two heavyweight editors, vim and emacs, have 12 and 10 users respectively. A long list of other integrations included editors, Python packages and hosted services on the web, but only a few respondents mentioned each one. See the ‘Integration’ sheet of the results spreadsheet for the cleaned data.

Installation¶ No one installation method dominated. The leading techniques were pip/easy_install (48%), Linux distribution repositories (44%) and Python distributions (38%).

Support resources¶ Almost all users (91%) report using the online documentation, highlighting the importance of keeping this up to date. Stackoverflow is also very important (68%). In contrast, only 3% of respondents have used our Hipchat chat rooms - though these are quite new, so people may not be aware of them yet.

Role¶ Once again, many of our users are in academia (65%), but we also have a significant group of users in industry (38%) and ‘hobby’ usage (37%), i.e. people using IPython outside their jobs. These numbers are not directly comparable to the last survey, because last time, the categories were taken from a free text answer. 24% of respondents also said they were using IPython in education. In the future, we could break this down more to look at teaching and learning.

Use cases¶ People’s descriptions of the projects where they use IPython were many and varied. A few specific highlights include modelling quantum computing systems (row 93 in the results spreadsheet), computer vision (162), phylogenetic relationships of languages (201), e-Democracy (261), pressure measurements under animals’ feet (423), and processing data from particle colliders (195) and gamma ray telescopes (454). Grouping the responses, people are using IPython in at least these areas: Finance/economics

Bioinformatics

Neuroscience

Chemistry

Astronomy

Physics And in these ways: Machine learning

Data cleaning

Writing papers

Developing other application and libraries

Matlab replacement