The problem is more complicated than just C code being more difficult to build.
The whole distutils infrastructure is messy and badly designed. It takes care of everything from build up to installation and packaging, and all those parts are tighly coupled. It is also incredibly inflexible, and the way to extend it through subclassing leads to incompatible code (if package A subclass distutils, and package B subclass the same thing, how can you use A and B ?). Almost every design decision of distutils is wrong, and badly implemented.
Numpy and scipy binaries are built for every release: actually, that's the platform we support the best in some sense since we can reliably build binaries, and that saddens me quite a bit.
You guys do an amazing and thankless job, and I'm sorry if I oversimplified that aspect of it. It's just difficult to see how to solve the problems you describe, let alone to explain those problems to a researcher you're trying to wean off Fortran. :)
The whole distutils infrastructure is messy and badly designed. It takes care of everything from build up to installation and packaging, and all those parts are tighly coupled. It is also incredibly inflexible, and the way to extend it through subclassing leads to incompatible code (if package A subclass distutils, and package B subclass the same thing, how can you use A and B ?). Almost every design decision of distutils is wrong, and badly implemented.
Numpy and scipy binaries are built for every release: actually, that's the platform we support the best in some sense since we can reliably build binaries, and that saddens me quite a bit.