Your fears regarding Python on Windows were quite justified. However, the world has dramatically changed, thanks in large part to folks like Continuum.io and their Anaconda distribution, Christoph Golke, and many other wheel providers.
Visual Studio actually provides an option to download Anaconda for you. It has a few hundred pre-built Windows pkgs ready to go. We also use it on our free jupyter notebook service and have been very happy with it.
/Dev on Team/
Also many packages, NumPy for instance, have improved their builds for Windows. This is a combination effort of better support on the platform side to make things better but also from package maintainers to support Windows users better.
If you have been away from Windows for a bit, I think now is a good time to at least take a cursory look around again ;)
Your fears regarding Python on Windows were quite justified. However, the world has dramatically changed, thanks in large part to folks like Continuum.io and their Anaconda distribution, Christoph Golke, and many other wheel providers.
Visual Studio actually provides an option to download Anaconda for you. It has a few hundred pre-built Windows pkgs ready to go. We also use it on our free jupyter notebook service and have been very happy with it.
UCI repo: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/
Anaconda: https://www.continuum.io/downloads
Azure Notebooks: https://notebooks.azure.com