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Author rhettinger
Recipients mark.dickinson, rhettinger, selik, steven.daprano, tim.peters
Date 2019-02-20.00:33:27
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Message-id <1550622807.59.0.770038258094.issue36018@roundup.psfhosted.org>
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I'll work up a PR for this.  

We can continue to tease-out the best method names. I've has success with "examples" and "from_samples" when developing this code in the classroom.  Both names had the virtue of being easily understood and never being misunderstood.

Intellectually, the name fit() makes sense because we are using data to create best fit model parameters.  So, technically this is probably the most accurate terminology.  However, it doesn't match how I think about the problem though -- that is more along the lines of "use sampling data to make a random variable with a normal distribution".  Another minor issue is that class methods are typically (but not always) recognizable by their from-prefix (e.g. dict.fromkeys, datetime.fromtimestamp, etc).

"NormalDist" seems more self explanatory to me that just "Normal".  Also, the noun form seems "more complete" than a dangling adjective (reading "normal" immediately raises the question "normal what?").  FWIW, MS Excel also calls their variant NORM.DIST (formerly spelled without the dot).
History
Date User Action Args
2019-02-20 00:33:27rhettingersetrecipients: + rhettinger, tim.peters, mark.dickinson, steven.daprano, selik
2019-02-20 00:33:27rhettingersetmessageid: <1550622807.59.0.770038258094.issue36018@roundup.psfhosted.org>
2019-02-20 00:33:27rhettingerlinkissue36018 messages
2019-02-20 00:33:27rhettingercreate