Surely there's a place for technical criticism? If you think I've over-stepped that and made comments which reflect personally on the NLTK maintainers I'll apologise and revise. That wasn't my intention.
For a long time we've been in a situation where everyone experienced in NLP knows, but nobody says, that you should not use NLTK. That's not a healthy situation.
Having a book as baggage explains but does not excuse how out-of-date and low-quality NLTK's software is. The bottom-line is that in 2015 you can't go to NLTK and:
a) Learn how modern NLP is done;
b) Access a convenient toolkit of reliable, basic NLP components.
That's the mission statement, right? Well I think they don't achieve that, and that they do a disservice by pretending they do.
I have to disagree with the GP and agree with you...NLTK is a deservedly popular library and an attack on it is going to seem like an attack on its many hard-working volunteers...but good on you for putting the time into building an open source project that follows your vision of an alternative...that's far from being just a griper, and it's often the way that software in a field improves. I'm definitely going to try out spacy.
For a long time we've been in a situation where everyone experienced in NLP knows, but nobody says, that you should not use NLTK. That's not a healthy situation.
Having a book as baggage explains but does not excuse how out-of-date and low-quality NLTK's software is. The bottom-line is that in 2015 you can't go to NLTK and:
a) Learn how modern NLP is done;
b) Access a convenient toolkit of reliable, basic NLP components.
That's the mission statement, right? Well I think they don't achieve that, and that they do a disservice by pretending they do.