Anaconda Acquires PythonAnywhere
Data science champion Anaconda has announced the acquisition of PythonAnywhere for an undisclosed sum. PythonAnywhere is a cloud-based development and web hosting service designed specifically for the Python programming language.
According to Anaconda, the acquisition will increase Python accessibility and adoption, giving data scientists and developers direct access to all the “tools and artifacts” they require for their data science and machine learning projects.
Python everywhere
“[We] built the Anaconda Distribution to include an easy-to-use package and environment manager, packages that contain their cross-language dependencies, installers for all major operating systems and architectures, and a desktop console with direct access to all the tools and artifacts a developer needs for their data science and machine learning projects,” explained Anaconda.
Founded in 2012, PythonAnywhere has some 400,000 users and hosts 50,000 websites. The service comes with a full-fledged editor with syntax-highlighting and error-checking, as well as a full set of modules.
Coding online avoids the challenges of having to install Python and related modules on individual computers, along with the complications of members potentially ending up with different versions. With PythonAnywhere, team members can just focus on collaboration and running their code, with no server configuration required.
Anaconda will leverage the acquisition to expand its hosting and infrastructure capabilities in the cloud while immediately offering an online IDE to its user community to allow them to code, collaborate, and access their Python code from anywhere.
In May, we reported on Anaconda’s release of the PyScript project, which allows data scientists and programmers to embed Python programs in HTML pages and execute them within the browser.
In its press release, Anaconda referred to PyScript, noting that PyScript provides greater flexibility around what job they can do. On its part PythonAnywhere gives Python developers and data scientists greater flexibility around where they do their job.
“Both [PyScript and PythonAnywhere] enable Anaconda to greatly advance Python accessibility, which will ultimately lead to more use cases beyond data science and increased adoption amongst programmers and non-programmers alike.”
We have previously reported that Python use by data scientists is growing due to its various strengths that make it ideal for data science.
And as more data scientists gravitate to Python, the code repositories and ecosystems around Python will only grow, in turn giving newcomers an even greater incentive to learn Python and use it for their data science initiatives.
Image credit: iStockphoto/zhanghaitao
