Back in November 2012, I asked Python users in Science to fill out a survey to find out what Python, Numpy, and Scipy versions they were using, and how they maintain their installation. My motivation for this was to collect quantitative information to inform discussions amongst developers regarding which versions to support, because those discussions are usually based only on guessing and personal experience. In particular, there has been some discussion in the Astropy project regarding whether we should drop support for Numpy 1.4, but we had no quantitative information about whether this would affect many users (which motivated this study).

In this post, I'll give an overview of the results, as well as access to the (anonymized) raw data. First, I should mention that given my area of research and networks, the only community I obtained significant data are Astronomers, so the results I present here only include these (though I also provide the raw data for the remaining users for anyone interested).