This chapter is taken from book A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python by H. P. Langtangen, 4th edition, Springer, 2014.

Anaconda and Spyder

Anaconda is a free Python distribution produced by Continuum Analytics and contains about 200 Python packages, as well as Python itself, for doing a wide range of scientific computations. Anaconda can be downloaded from http://continuum.io/downloads.

The Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Spyder is included with Anaconda and is my recommended tool for writing and running Python programs on Mac and Windows, unless you have preference for a plain text editor for writing programs and a terminal window for running them.

Spyder on Mac

Spyder is started by typing spyder in a (new) Terminal application. If you get an error message unknown locale, you need to type the following line in the Terminal application, or preferably put the line in your $HOME/.bashrc Unix initialization file:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8; export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Installation of additional packages

Anaconda installs the pip tool that is handy to install additional packages. In a Terminal application on Mac or in a PowerShell terminal on Windows, write

pip install --user packagename