It may be fine for those who want to work entirely in Python to abandon NEURON's Interviews-implemented GUI, but this has its own costs and hazards. The costs are numerous and significant: it means giving up powerful tools and functionality, such as the CellBuilder, Channel Builder, Linear Circuit Builder, and Model View., which users will find very difficult to replicate on their own. And even hoc's lowly Graph class has more useful features than any graphs I have yet seen that were generated by users working entirely with Python. The principal hazard is breaking a model specification that relies on one of the model-specification GUI tools such as CellBuilder, Channel Builder, Linear Circuit Builder. Finally, far more published NEURON models have been implemented with hoc than with Python. For the near and intermediate term, trying to purge GUI-related hoc code is going to divert user time and effort from productive pursuit of research issues to less-productive code wrangling and "reinvention of the wheel."
My Python expertise is still rather limited, but the fact that anything in hoc can be accessed from Python and vice-versa suggests to me that it should be possible for a Python user to be able to load and run existing hoc code, with little or no modification, and take advantage of whatever InterViews-library-dependent GUI elements that code may bring up. I discussed this with Michael Hines, who replied:
I was unaware that the PyNeuron package had left out InterViews and, apparently, even the nrn/lib/hoc standard hoc lilbrary files. It is true that InterViews has not been available under mswin except as a cygwin version and therefore was not available in conjunction with enthought python. Also, as a cygwin program NEURON could not be built as a 64bit program on WIn7. However, InterViews now builds as a mingw library and so is usable with enthought. Also everything builds as a 64bit program. So I don't think it is necessary to abandon the existing GUI just yet.
. . .
Linux and Mac all nicely allow enthought, python, InterViews, NEURON to play together in the 32 and 64 bit worlds. There are just a few loose ends to tie up so that is also the case for mswin.
The specific problems with mswin are:
. . . I am trying to fix a bug with the mingw64 port. Also both 32 and 64 bit versions have a problem with 'import numpy', apparently due to a version conflict between some mswin library used by enthought and my mingw installation.