IPython started as a better interactive Python interpreter in 2001, but over the last decade it has grown into a rich and powerful set of interlocking tools aimed at maximizing developer productivity with Python while using the language interactively.
Today, IPython consists of a kernel executing user code and capable of communicating (using ZeroMQ for networking and through a well-documented protocol) with a variety of clients. This enables IPython to support, from a single codebase, a rich variety of usage scenarios through user-facing applications and an API for embedding:
An interactive, terminal-based shell with many capabilities far beyond the default Python interactive interpreter (this is the default application opened by the ipython command that most users are familiar with).
A Qt console that provides the look and feel of a terminal, but adds support for inline figures, graphical calltips, a persistent session that can survive crashes (even segfaults) of the kernel process, and more. A user-based review of some of these features can be found here.
A web-based notebook that can execute code and also contain rich text and figures, mathematical equations and arbitrary HTML. This notebook presents a document-like view with cells where code is executed but that can be edited in-place, reordered, mixed with explanatory text and figures, etc. A detailed review of this system can be found here.
A high-performance, low-latency system for parallel computing that supports the control of a cluster of IPython engines communicating over ZeroMQ, with optimizations that minimize unnecessary copying of large objects (especially numpy arrays).
In this talk, I will briefly describe IPython's architecture and will then show hands-on demos of the main applications.
An outline of the talk follows:
>>> shell not enough.For full details about IPython including documentation, previous presentations and videos of talks, please see the project website.