[yt-dev] Issue #1188: Trouble Getting Started with yt (yt_analysis/yt)

[Cameron Hummels]

Yeah, looking over the quickstart, I guess it isn't necessarily clear that
an ipython notebook acts like a python terminal if you're unfamiliar with
it.  And the ipython->jupyter thing has left us in a weird place, probably
worth it to just wholesale change everything to jupyter references.

Good to get some honest constructive criticism, and I think we can benefit
from this.

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 5:16 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:

> There's a lot of information in this ticket, and I wanted to highlight
> it for folks on the dev list that might otherwise filter these out.
> Sadly, the person who left it hasn't left any contact info.  But, that
> doesn't mean that it can't be synthesized into a plan of action,
> particularly for improving documentation, 2D data, and so on.  One
> important thing, which I personally hadn't realized is a problem, is
> the repeated mentions that non-notebook access should be emphasized.
>
> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 6:45 PM, Anonymous <issues-reply at bitbucket.org>
> wrote:
> > New issue 1188: Trouble Getting Started with yt
> >
> https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/issues/1188/trouble-getting-started-with-yt
> >
> > Anonymous:
> >
> > I'm a new user to yt and I've been having a really frustrating time
> getting started. I work with large simulations and have been using VisIt
> for 2D data. I want to switch to yt but the frustration of just trying to
> get it to run almost made me quit and go back to VisIt.
> >
> > My first problem was figuring out how to start yt at all. I went to the
> quickstart guide, but all it told me to do was run a bunch of ipython
> notebooks. Nowhere did it mention that yt can just be imported into python
> like any other module and run from there, which would have saved me a lot
> of time and trouble. I don't know how to run an ipython notebook; I've
> never used them before. I eventually figured out how to create one, but
> then I had to access it remotely. All my data resides on the filesystem of
> the supercomputer where it was calculated. It's not feasible to fetch it to
> my local machine, especially not when I'm generating new data much faster
> than I could transfer it. So analysis needs to run on the viz node.
> Eventually I got a notebook to connect (needed to set up an ssh tunnel
> apparently) but it was really annoying to work through. I may be a
> programmer by profession, but I don't often deal with web stuff, and all of
> this setup is badly-explained when it's explain
>  ed
> >   at all
> >  on the relevant websites. Like I said, this could have been avoided if
> the quickstart guide had ever mentioned that I could just import it and
> work with it like any other python module instead of diving straight into
> notebooks.
> >
> > I got lost for a while in the fact that there seems to be two sets of
> documentation for ipython notebooks - ipython, but then jupyter? All the
> recent documentation on notebooks is written for jupyter, but that's not
> installed on my viz node and yt's docs don't say anything about it. So that
> also confused the heck out of me for a little while.
> >
> > The cookbook recipes are also real confusing if you're working with 2D
> data. Nearly everything is written assuming you have a 3D dataset. I had to
> mess around a bit before I figured out that you could do a SlicePlot with a
> 2D dataset as long as you specify a slice axis that does not, technically,
> exist. ProjectionPlot is really what should be used for 2D data but the
> name makes it non-obvious that that's what you want.
> >
> > yt itself is great and I'd really like to use it. I understand that a
> lot of the devs and members of the community work with things like
> bitbucket and ipython notebooks on a daily basis, but I spend most of my
> time tackling 30-year-old Fortran and I'm certainly not the only one. I
> have enough trouble just getting these simulations to run in the first
> place; there's no room in my workflow for me to devote large chunks of time
> to unraveling the visualization software. Programs like VisIt and EnSuite
> might be balky and obscenely expensive, but in general you can turn them
> on, click a button, open your data, and get a simple picture in a few
> minutes. Please overhaul the "quickstart" guides so that it's easier for
> someone like me who has python and matplotlib experience but no notebook
> experience to just turn the dang thing on and make a picture with a minimum
> of fuss.
> >
> >
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>



-- 
Cameron Hummels
NSF Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Astronomy
California Institute of Technology
http://chummels.org
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