Squeezed by anaconda

A week or two back, I started doing an online course for Python. May as well have a tenuous grasp of another language, right? To start, they had me install a thing — I suppose it is an IDE — called Anaconda, which actually seems very nice and easy. However, it has definitely done something to my established environment, because when I went to run my weekly stats script, I got a bunch of errors saying it couldn’t find things that it had been perfectly well able to find before I installed Anaconda.

Anaconda engraving 1885

Doing anything interesting through Anaconda is still way above my pay grade. I’d like to just be able to disable the environment it seems to have set up until I need it, but even that is beyond me for the moment.

In any case, searching online offered a couple of ways to tell the stats script where to look for those modules. None of them worked, for me, and I think I tried everything. I let the whole thing ride until today, when I put off a very boring job by fixing this problem. Encouraged by an online friend, I took a deep breath and typed cpan install Modern::Perl.

Me: Progress! Now there's something else it can't find, which is fine. I'll just keep iterating until I succeed or get a different error.
My friend: yep, that's exactly what everyone does when there are missing libraries 😊

So now maybe I’m a step further along the path to understand this stuff. Or, if not understand, at least use it. And the Python course must be doing some good; note the highly technical use of “iterating”.

Filed under | Geeky |

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@jeremycherfas how exactly does something for python 🐍 break Perl? (Presuming your stats script is camel 🐪 based.)
5 years ago
@jeremycherfas My condolences. The connection might very well be that something messed around with paths so that specific libraries would be found first in a path search. Such tricks are common ways for Python developers to set up their environments.
5 years ago
@cn in my (limited) understanding, Anaconda sets up an environment that overrides my original $PATH. More than that I cannot say. I’d love to be able to persuade Anaconda to stop doing that unless asked to.
5 years ago
@fgtech Thanks. That certainly seems correct, though it does seem a little rude.
5 years ago
@jeremycherfas Yes, it’s totally rude to do that without warning. For Python, it’s a workaround that solves other thorny problems. It’s been a while since I’ve had to deal with those but hopefully the migration to Python 3 will smooth out many of those kinks.
5 years ago
@jeremycherfas I would be looking for the most recently changed dot–files in my $HOME $ ls -alrt ~ | tail
5 years ago

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