We Keep Coding

How to install pip for a total newbie

I have read a bunch of posts here and on Google, but my question is far more basic than the answers: If Python(2.7) came pre-installed on my MacBook Pro (High Sierra), can I just do sudo easy_install pip (as suggested) from the command line--withOUT causing issues? I have a vague understanding of global/local installations, and my understanding is certain Python installations aren't compatible with local/global kernel installations. I hope I am getting the terminology right, but I saw several warnings about installing pip for "a homebrew based python installation", but I am not sure whether Python on my laptop is installed via homebrew (nor how to find out).
My question came about because I wanted to install the Hydrogen package to use in Atom, the text editor (to help me learn Python). I finally succeeded in installing Hydrogen, but got stumped by the missing kernels (not sure which ones I need, so I am willing to install them all). But I can't seem to install the kernels without pip. So here I am.
My apologies for asking such a basic question--and thanks!

The rule of thumb is: If your operating system has a package manager, use it.
Unfortunately, MacOS is the only UNIX-like operating system that does not come with a decent package managment system.
(There is the app store, but that is useless for a lot open source software for several different reasons. It's also a walled garden.)
You have several choices (in descreasing suitability):
Use one of the package managers available for MacOS. Which one is the best choice for you depends on all the packages you need being available.
Use a Python distribution. I've used Anaconda on ms-windows, and that has saved me a lot of hassle. A good choice if you are only looking for Python and related libraries.
Build everything yourself. This can be very time-consuming and is a duplication of effort. You will learn a lot though.
I would second Piinthesky's comment that you install Python 3.6. Python 2.7 is now a legacy version.

Well although I am no Mac expert I've given it a shot anyway:
Yes you could but do you really want to risk it (or even do it)?
Mac-OS must rely on Python to fulfill something in the OS otherwise it would not come inbuilt. This means two things:
The Python installation will be minimal. By that I mean it will have things missing (any large library for a start). They will do this mainly to cut down on the OS size. Therefore you will not have the full Python library and in the long term you may end up missing out.
Second if anything went wrong (IE you broke your installation or even modified it -yep I've done this in Linux and have ended up factory resetting) then you may cause something to stop working and may need to factory reset or perform some other drastic action on your OS. A separate installation would prevent your from risking this. This is very useful because there comes a time when you may decide to update certain modules with pip and find it can't or it updates something that you shouldn't be messing with.
Yes it's possible you may run into compatibility problems but I think it's most widely accepted that you do not use the inbuilt one as it needs to remain unchanged if the OS is to use it correctly. Messing with it increases the chances of it breaking.
Conclusion: So even though installing modules with pip (and getting pip) can be done with the inbuilt Python it comes down whether you want to risk harming your OS. I strongly suggest you get a separate installation and leave the inbuilt one as it is. Second as you mentioned you will find that the inbuilt versions are never up-to-date or are built were they are not really compatible with standard libraries (expect things like the missing runtime libraries all the time) , just another reason to stay clear of them.

This is how I solved this problem-for those newbies who just want Hydrogen to work:
Installed Python 3 (instead of messing around with Python 2.7 and pip).
Followed instructions here (https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/installing-packages/#ensure-you-can-run-pip-from-the-command-line) for 'get-pip.py'.
In Atom, cmd+shift+p to bring up the packages menu, clicked on 'Hydrogen Run', which gave me the errors again.
Copied the code from the warnings and installed the kernels needed (via the command line).
Hydrogen is now working.
Thanks for all the tips!

How is Anaconda related to Python?

I am a beginner and I want to learn computer programming. So, for now, I have started learning Python by myself with some knowledge about programming in C and Fortran.
Now, I have installed Python version 3.6.0 and I have struggled finding a suitable text for learning Python in this version. Even the online lecture series ask for versions 2.7 and 2.5 .
Now that I have got a book which, however, makes codes in version 2 and tries to make it as close as possible in version 3 (according to the author); the author recommends "downloading Anaconda for Windows" for installing Python.
So, my question is: What is this 'Anaconda'? I saw that it was some open data science platform. What does it mean? Is it some editor or something like Pycharm, IDLE or something?
Also, I downloaded my Python (the one that I am using right now) for Windows from Python.org and I didn't need to install any "open data science platform".
So what is this happening?
Please explain in easy language. I don't have too much knowledge about these.

Anaconda is a commercial python and R distribution. It aims to provide everything you need (Python-wise) for data science "out of the box".
It includes:
The core Python language
100+ Python "packages" (libraries)
Spyder (IDE/editor - like PyCharm) and Jupyter
conda, Anaconda's own package manager, used for updating Anaconda and packages
Your course may have recommended it as it comes with these extras but if you don't need them and are getting on fine with vanilla Python that's OK too.
Learn more: https://www.anaconda.com/distribution/

Anaconda is a Python distribution that makes it easy to install Python plus a number of its most often used 3rd party libraries in a flexible way on a Windows or Linux machine.
My experiences with it are very positive, both on Windows and Linux. It is quite complete and avoids problems in building libraries that you need from source code, that frequently plague one by one installations of those libraries by tools like pip.
By the way: It's very wise to start with 3.5 or 3.6 since 2.7 is approaching the end of its lifecycle, though many applications still depend on it.
As for tutorials: Pythons own docs are quite suitable for learning the language.
https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/

Anaconda is a Python-based data processing and scientific computing platform. It has built in many very useful third-party libraries. Installing Anaconda is equivalent to automatically installing Python and some commonly used libraries such as Numpy, Pandas, Scrip, and Matplotlib, so it makes the installation so much easier than regular Python installation. If you don't install Anaconda, but instead only install Python from python.org, you also need to use pip to install various libraries one by one. It is painful and you need to consider compatibility, thus it is highly recommended to directly install Anaconda.

How to uninstall and/or manage multiple versions of python in OS X 10.10.3

I have installed the Python IDE Spyder. For me it's a great development environment.
Some how in this process I have managed to install three versions of Python on my system.These can be located as following:
Version 2.7.6 from the OS X Terminal;
Version 2.7.8 from the Spyder Console; and
Version 2.7.9rc1 from an IDL window.
The problem I have is (I think) that the multiple versions are preventing Spyder from working correctly.
So how do I confirm that 2.7.6 is the latest version supported by Apple and is there a simple way ('silver bullet') to remove other versions from my system.
I hope this is the correct forum for this question. If not I would appreciate suggestions where I could go for help.
I want to keep my life simple and to develop python software in the Spyder IDE. I am not an OS X guru and I really don't want to get into a heavy duty command line action. To that end I just want to delete/uninstall the 'unofficial versions' of Python. Surely there must be an easy way to do this - perhaps 'pip uninstall Python-2.7.9rc1' or some such. The problem is that I am hesitant to try this due to the fear that it will crash my system.
Help on this would be greatly appreciated.

(Spyder dev here) There is no simple way to do what you ask for, at least for the Python version that comes with Spyder.
I imagine you downloaded and installed our DMG package. That package comes with its own Python version as part of the application (along with several important scientific packages), so it can't be removed because that would imply to remove Spyder itself :-)
I don't know how you installed IDL(E?), so I can't advise you on how to remove it.

Python development setup

So, id like to start serious python development, and its proven to be a big pain. Im not worried at all about the language itself; I like it well enough and I will have no problems picking it up. But the ecosystem is driving me crazy.
First I tried to get up and running under windows. I gave up on that after a few days, as 90% of packages dont include windows support / install instructions. So I switched to macosx, which people said was good for mac development.
More frustration ensues. Id like to use python as a matlab replacement and tool development platform, so spyderlib seems like an excellent tool. But now ive been busy trying to build pyqt on my mac for two days, to no avail, and im starting to question the wisdom of it all. Obviously, following several guides literally invariantly ends in cryptic errors. For which platform was this dependency built? What arcane compiler flags need to be set? I dont know and I dont care; why doesnt the installer figure it out? Oh wait, there isnt any... I want to USE these tools, not first completely reverse engineer them to find out how to build them.
There is a vast amount of implied knowledge in all the documentation I can find on these matters, both with regard to unix and pythonic quirks. Is there any way to scale this mountain, in a place with a managable learning curve? Right now I have no idea what im doing. Or should I go back to windows and try to coerce the unix packages I need into cooperation?

On Mac OS X, you can get spyder with macports. This should build everything needed.
If you prefer Windows, take a look at Python(x,y). It has a bunch of scientific tools pre-built, including spyder.
Finally, the Enthought Python distribution is worth considering for scientific work.

Have you tried ActivePython?
Why battle with compiling the modules yourself when you can get the pre-built packages from PyPM?
pypm install pyqt4 matplotlib scipy numpy

From my experience the best platform for kind of project you're describing is Linux. There you just install the libs you need from package manager and that's it. Binary packages, so compiling is not required.
If you want to stick with MacOS X, you should install either MacPorts or Fink. It's usually easy to use. Problem is, that things like Qt take forever to compile. But you won't be doing that very often.
As for installing Python modules, the best is PIP, which is very nice replacement for easy_install did does much more. Especially useful if you want virtualenv setup.

This is nearly the exact opposite of my experience with Python on Windows. Python itself installs with a binary installer, most add-on packages support easy_install, others provide binary installers of their own. The IDE I use is SciTE, which uses the old DOS install model - copy the files to a directory and run the SciTE.exe file. If you get a source distribution of a Python package, go to the directory containing setup.py and run python setup.py install. Maybe that's the implied knowledge you're talking about.
You can also find many unofficial Windows binaries at http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/.

I switched to Mac a few years ago and found that it took me quite a while of googling to properly install all the packages I needed for Python development. While I installed everything I made a list of the steps required to setup a functional system that may be appropriate for you as well. I usually use NetCDF4, HDF5, Numpy, Matplotlib, f2py, and Fortran in combination with Python. I published my list of 22 setup-steps for installing from source on my website. Installing from source is somewhat more time-consuming than using macports and fink, but enables you to have a working environment that is optimized for your system.

Can EPD Python and MacPorts Python coexist on OS X (matplotlib)?

I've been using MacPorts Python 2.6 on OS X 10.6.
I am considering also installing the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD) on the same machine because it comes preconfigured with matplotlib and other nice data analysis and visualization packages.
Can the two Python distributions co-exist peacefully on the same machine?
What potential problems will I have to look out for (e.g., environment variables)?
I know that building matplotlib through MacPorts is an option, but the process is lengthy (on the order of a full day) and there are open questions about compiling some dependencies on 64bit Intel.
I would like to know about the tradeoffs before committing to one of the two approaches.

I'm not an OSX user, so I can't say for certain, but you should be fine.
EPD bundles its own python interpreter and all required libraries. The installer basically just extracts a tarball into a stand-alone folder.
The linux installer doesn't modify any environment variables (not even $PATH), so I assume the mac installer is similar.
(Because of this, you'll probably want to manually set up aliases to the EPD python/ipython/etc binaries so you can more easily call them without changing your $PATH.)
EPD really should be completely stand-alone, as far as I know. It should be safe to install along-side anything else.

I've used EPD on Windows 7. It works great. Only stalled on me a couple of times with rather large data set.
I also use OSX, and was about to install EPD but hesitating a bit.
I think python 2.7.3 that comes with EPD (early 2013) will become the default python. Normally, upgrading to 2.7 from 2.6 should not be much of problem based on my personal experience. But I am a bit concerned to have 2 versions of 2.7 and what kind of impact it will have on using GAE SDK on my OSX. (Upgrading created a bit of hassle with GAE SKD.)
Here is what EPD readme says:
A full installation will install the following:
* Python framework -- installed into:
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.3
Python applications -- installed into
/Applications/Enthought
System fixes -- makes the EPD Python your default one by adding lines to
your .bash_profile to your path.
I think I will sleep on this.