Item: Anaconda
Rating: 9
Author: Ayush Choukse

Overall Satisfaction with Anaconda

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

If you are doing Python analytics, it's possible but nearly pointless to roll your own distribution. There are only two main analytics distributions, and Anaconda is the better one. So use Anaconda. As a distribution, if you are doing other Python stuff, then Anaconda holds a lesser utility.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Anaconda (i.e. Python with lots of packages and the fabulous iPython/Jupyter Notebook) does analytics well. In analytics, or "data science" or whatever buzzword, you have to pick your poison: Python, R, or SAS. Python is the only one that's good at doing other things as well.
Like the visualization...The quality of the built-in types of scientific visualization in Python vs. R and their aesthetics is up for grabs. However, Python can do a whole lot of different kinds of visualization above and beyond R. Similarly, JavaScript probably can do more/better visualization than Python, but it's not meant for analytics. Anaconda has enough visualization packages to get you started.

Cons

It's still a little buggy. Especially the launcher.
It's not always easy to set up. It's not exactly difficult: a Google search away for most things, but silly stuff like path names, installing custom fonts and colors. That kind of thing.