We posted a recording of a 30 minute webinar that we did on the 20th that covers what Canopy is and why we developed it. There’s a few minutes of Brett Murphy(Product Manager at Enthought) discussing the “why” with some slides, and then Jason McCampbell (Development Manager for Canopy) gets into the interesting part with a 15+ minute demo of some of the key capabilities and workflows in Canopy. If you would like to watch the recorded webinar, you can find it here (the different formats will play directly in different browsers so check them and you won’t have to download the whole recording first):
Summed up in one line: Canopy provides the minimal set of tools for non-programmers to access, analyze and visualize data in an open-source Python environment.
The challenge in the past for scientists, engineers and analysts who wanted to use Python had been pulling together a working, integrated Python environment for scientific computing. Finding compatible versions of the dozens of Python packages, compiling them and integrating it all was very time consuming. That’s why we released the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD) many years back. It provided a single install of all the major packages you needed to do scientific and analytic computing with Python.
But the primary interface for a user of EPD was the command line. For a scientist or analyst used to an environment like MATLAB or one of the R IDEs, the command line is a little unapproachable and makes Python challenging to adopt. This is why we developed Canopy.
Enthought Canopy is both a Python distribution (like EPD) and an analysis environment. The analysis environment includes an integrated editor and IPython prompt to faciliate script development & testing and data analysis & plotting. The graphical package manager becomes the main interface to the Python ecosystem with its package search, install and update capabilities. And the documentation browser makes online documentation for Canopy, Python and the popular Python packages available on the desktop.
Check out the Canopy demo in the recorded webinar (link above). We hope it’s helpful.