4 ms·
Completely bizarre attitude (creator of pandas here).
by wesm 11y ago
Completely bizarre attitude (creator of pandas here).
- vog 11y agoNot disagreeing with you, but would you mind elaborating on that?
- wesm 11y agoClaiming that using wrapped libraries written in another programming language (LAPACK, anyone?) is an inauthentic usage of the language (here, Python) is pedantic and unhelpful. C is just a wrapper for assembly, then, right?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lmm 11y agoSometimes it's not - sometimes LAPACK is written in C. Sometimes your C is just a wrapper around FORTRAN and people should take this fact seriously: modern FORTRAN is often a better option than C for numerical workloads.
- wesm 11y agoI never stated what language LAPACK was written in.
- sukulaku 11y agoWhy is it bizarre? His point is that the article shouldn't make it sound like "Python is fast", because the speed actually comes from the libraries that have been implemented in C.
- wesm 11y agoBy bizarre I mean impractical and unhelpful. What's the point of programming at all if we cannot leverage abstractions to make ourselves more productive? I believe what the article says is that "Python has tools that enable a savvy user to achieve better results with less effort". Python is extremely popular in HPC settings (including supercomputers) for this reason. I see nothing disingenuous.
- sukulaku 11y agoWell, the word "bizarre" has a commonly understood meaning, but you somehow decided to use it to mean something completely different. That's a bit bizarre :P But the article is titled: "Why I Still Use Python for High Performance Scientific Computing", and it gives the impression that Python - the language - is fast enough for HPSC. In reality, the reason why he "still" uses Python is that the libraries are fast enough for HPSC. But that's not what people see when reading posts like this. The message they see is that "Python is fast", not that some of its 3rd-party libraries are fast. But I should probably stop repeating myself here.
- andreasvc 11y agoFirst, there's no reason to only associate "Python" with "the language", it is an environment, ecosystem, etc. It's not interesting to narrowly focus on the efficiency of the interpreter. Second, it is an inherent feature of the design of CPython that its C API allows tight integration with external libraries in C. Cython does not just glue C and Python together, it does this in a way which makes the integration easier and safer than doing it by hand (e.g., generating correct reference counting code). All of this is a direct benefit of Python and its scientific ecosystem.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoThank you for pandas.