Hello,
As I use Anaconda a lot for my Data Science projects, I wanted to share the link to Anaconda so that new programmers may have a lot of useful features out of the box.
Thanks,
Ryan.
Hi @Silverasdf 
Welcome to the Exercism forums!
Thank you for taking the time to submit a PR to the Python repo. 
The main distribution of Python that I use on a daily basis is Anaconda, and I often recommend it to those who are learning data engineering, data science, or machine learning – and to people who need to use multiple versions of Python at the same time.
Unfortunately, we can’t recommend Anaconda to Exercism students for multiple reasons:
- We aim to teach Python language fluency (and general programming) to students. Data Science libraries (while really important) are not general-purpose programming, and not part of the core Python language.
- As a tail-on to #1, none of the libraries that are part of the Anaconda distribution (except for the different versions of Python itself) are in use on the Exercism platform. You can’t use
NumPyin an Exercism solution and have tests pass – our tooling doesn’t install third-party libraries (with the exceptions ofPyTestandPyLint). This means that students can’t learn to use those libraries online here (at least not in the near future). - The standard install of Anaconda (not miniconda) is huge – gigs of stuff, and lots of time to download on a slower internet connection. Since almost all of that download is not useful for Exercism, it would be problematic to recommend it to newer students.
- Most installations of Anaconda on most platforms change the Python PATH, install shims and pointers, add special Anaconda shells, and generally rewire things. This can cause real problems for students who are unfamiliar with how those things work, and adds quite a bit of complexity.
So I am sorry - but I can’t accept this proposed change at this time, at least not to the INSTALLATION.md doc.