Re: [ANN] An impudent introduction to Guile

[Jan Wedekind <jan@wedesoft.de>]

On 6. Februar 2016 06:08:42 GMT+00:00, Panicz Maciej Godek <godek.maciek@gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi
>
>2016-02-06 1:47 GMT+01:00 Cao Jin <lop@null.net>:
>
>> It's interesting. I have used Matlab for many years, but never tried
>R. As
>> for as I know, there are tons of state-of-the-art library in R and
>Matlab.
>>
>> After skimming your paper, I wander that
>> 1) Are these library used in your code example implemented by
>yourself? Or
>> other libraries are called, such as LAPACK for linear algebra?
>>
>
>Everything is either written from scratch, or uses one of the helper
>libraries (two such libraries are included in the repo; the other is
>SRFI-1).
>The point of the book is that it is not a tutorial on using libraries,
>but
>it explains some methods and translates these explanations to Scheme,
>so
>that they can be modified and extended easily.
>
>If you are looking  for some serious numerical libraries for Scheme,
>there's a very powerful scmutils package available
>
>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~gildea/guile-scmutils/
>
>I've actually used its code for Singular Value Decomposition to perform
>Principal Component Analysis.
>
>2) Is it easy to use scheme and your library, or maybe some others, to
>do
>> computational job? In practice, those who use R or Matlab want their
>idea
>> to be proved quickly, not to spend time on coding style, right?
>>
>> I think it depends on a point of view. I initially tried using R, but
>it
>was causing many unexpected problems, but I already knew Scheme quite
>well,
>and for me even implementing the libraries from scratch wasn't that
>much
>of  a job.
>But the book is mostly about fun, and about understanding.
>Also, interfacing Guile with Emacs through Geiser is an incredible
>productivity boost.
>
>Interestingly, when I benchmarked the genetic algorithm that I wrote
>with
>genalg package from R, the Scheme version run in Guile actually
>outperformed the R version, although it was written in completely
>performance-naive style.
>
>On the other hand, if you wanted to use the decision trees classifier,
>you'd probably want to apply memoization.
>
>If scheme can do most computational job as python numpy does, I will
>switch
>> to it.
>>
>
>I think that in practice Scheme can be even more convinient, as it
>provides
>native support for complex numbers
>
>I also think it would be helpful to interface Guile with plot
>generation. I
>see that Nala has a guile-plot package, but I haven't tried it. I
>personally wrote some code for generating LaTeX pgfplots for the
>project,
>and can add it to the repo if you llike.

Interesting. Will have a look at how they expose operators.

Myself I have implemented http://github.com/wedesoft/aism for array operations.
-- 
Jan Wedekind
http://www.wedesoft.de/