Some feedback on Pythia

[clyne]

Just wanted to forward this message to NCAR/geocat-viz#39 from @eroesler

_I'm a long-time NCL user but have been motivated (several times) to try python. I usually land flat because of mixed functionality in environments and errors set by my institution's proxy in retrieving packages. I tried again, though, with the 'Getting Started' documentation written by the NCAR graphics team under project Pythia. Pythia started slow, which was good, understanding the audience needing to make plots and do data analysis, but it ended before it every said exactly how to start making NCL-quality plots. I've found Pangea, Metpy, and now Geocat. There are three (or four?) different Geocat repositories, with Github and Read.io documentation. Some say to clone the repo with git, some say have the conda package manager do it. All the documentation stops a bit short of a full 'Getting Started' guide like NCL used to have. I assume after I create a new environment (which sometimes fails, sometimes not), and activate it (but not seeing that activation confirmation in the command line prompt) that everything is okay, and I can 'python script-example.py', but errors are thrown.

Do I clone all three (or four), or just one? Where to I post if I run into an error? I started with the Examples, but I get an error saying xarray is not found. Xarray is a very neccessary package, if I'm understanding python correctly. I see the xarray downloaded and unzipped in the .condarc package directory, but can someone state if I should have it somewhere else? Am I missing an environment variable? Or is there another GeoCat repo I should download? After this n-th try of trying python, I'm closing in on getting a Matlab subscription. :( Thank you for your advice and help. I appreciate your vision in trying to make a one-stop shop for environments and plots for earth scientists._