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In my opinion, this is not about abandoning, but supplementing. Python is good at many things, as is Rust, as is Julia. Stuff like the ODE library that Chris h

In my opinion, this is not about abandoning, but supplementing. Python is good at many things, as is Rust, as is Julia. Stuff like the ODE library that Chris has, or JuMP (for mathematical programming) that Miles Lubin, Iain Dunning and Joey Huechette wrote, or a number of other packages are simply not available elsewhere. The Celeste project, for example, achieved 1.6 PetaFlop/sec of compute rate on half a million cores. Programming languages are abstractions. Some abstractions are better for certain kind of problems. Many of the amazing libraries that are available in Julia would simply not be easy to do otherwise. Think about it - if these were incremental advances and no serious community would ever form - then Chris would have never written his packages. Julia has seen over a million downloads. In my biased opinion, it is more than an incremental advance. I think the right approach is to understand where those advances are and apply it to the right kind of problems. There is a balance to be struck between the two extremes of nothing new will ever get adopted, and everything should adopt anything new and shiny that comes out.

throwaway7645 9y ago
Python's PULP & Pyomo are pretty similar to JUMP.
- StefanKarpinski 9y ago
  The JuMP paper [1] compares JuMP with all the major commercial and open source options in this area, including Pyomo. Pyomo is orders of magnitude slower than JuMP and doesn't scale as well so the comparison gets worse as problems get larger. (Pyomo had the worst performance of all the systems compared.) JuMP is the only open source option that has performance like commercial systems. Throw in JuMP's improved expressiveness and usability over Pyomo and JuMP's incredibly broad solver support [2] and there's really no contest. These days, your best option in Python is probably to call JuMP via pyjulia. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.01982.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.01982.pdf [2] http://jump.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#getting-solvers http://jump.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#getti...
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    Not sure how much performance matters here. You're just farming it off to CPLEX or Gurobi anyway. If performance really matters, you'll do this part in C++ anyway.
    - StefanKarpinski 9y ago
      Unless you're solving toy problems, it matters quite a bit. In mathematical optimization, constructing the problem tends to be just as expensive as solving the problem is – sometimes more so. The existence of expensive commercial systems like AMPL and GAMS that only exist to express optimization problems demonstrates that this is a non-trivial issue that people are willing to pay money for. Using C++ APIs to solvers is extremely painful, inflexible, error-prone, and completely locks you into a specific solver.
      - throwaway7645 9y ago
        Solver licenses are extremely expensive (~100k in production), so switching solvers isn't very common. Going to C++ helps a bit with I/O before it gets to the solver if you really need it, but a lot of people do just fine with things like AIMMS which is a proprietary high level modeling language similar in performance to Python. Maybe Julia + JUMP is nice if you want to remove I/O performance barriers, but don't want C++ pain & more flexibility, but I don't see JUMP being talked about much in the industry currently. If you don't mind me asking, what is your experience in this area and what domain are you working in?
        tavert 9y ago
        Stefan is one of the co-creators of the Julia language, not really an operations research person. He must have misread the results in the JuMP paper where Pyomo outperforms CVX and Yalmip on several problem classes.
        StefanKarpinski 9y ago

throwaway7645 9y ago

Python's PULP & Pyomo are pretty similar to JUMP.

StefanKarpinski 9y ago
The JuMP paper [1] compares JuMP with all the major commercial and open source options in this area, including Pyomo. Pyomo is orders of magnitude slower than JuMP and doesn't scale as well so the comparison gets worse as problems get larger. (Pyomo had the worst performance of all the systems compared.) JuMP is the only open source option that has performance like commercial systems. Throw in JuMP's improved expressiveness and usability over Pyomo and JuMP's incredibly broad solver support [2] and there's really no contest. These days, your best option in Python is probably to call JuMP via pyjulia. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.01982.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.01982.pdf [2] http://jump.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#getting-solvers http://jump.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#getti...
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  Not sure how much performance matters here. You're just farming it off to CPLEX or Gurobi anyway. If performance really matters, you'll do this part in C++ anyway.
  - StefanKarpinski 9y ago
    Unless you're solving toy problems, it matters quite a bit. In mathematical optimization, constructing the problem tends to be just as expensive as solving the problem is – sometimes more so. The existence of expensive commercial systems like AMPL and GAMS that only exist to express optimization problems demonstrates that this is a non-trivial issue that people are willing to pay money for. Using C++ APIs to solvers is extremely painful, inflexible, error-prone, and completely locks you into a specific solver.
    - throwaway7645 9y ago
      Solver licenses are extremely expensive (~100k in production), so switching solvers isn't very common. Going to C++ helps a bit with I/O before it gets to the solver if you really need it, but a lot of people do just fine with things like AIMMS which is a proprietary high level modeling language similar in performance to Python. Maybe Julia + JUMP is nice if you want to remove I/O performance barriers, but don't want C++ pain & more flexibility, but I don't see JUMP being talked about much in the industry currently. If you don't mind me asking, what is your experience in this area and what domain are you working in?
      - tavert 9y ago
        Stefan is one of the co-creators of the Julia language, not really an operations research person. He must have misread the results in the JuMP paper where Pyomo outperforms CVX and Yalmip on several problem classes.
        StefanKarpinski 9y ago