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> People who are scientists write code that we would think is disgusting and don’t care that much about abstraction outside of mathematical functions. - plent
by jstx1 5y ago
> People who are scientists write code that we would think is disgusting and don’t care that much about abstraction outside of mathematical functions.
- plenty of scientists write good code; I think the "scientist can't code" meme is harmful.
- most of the people that write PyTorch code aren't necessarily scientists - they're software developers (data scientists, ML engineers, research engineers, whatever title - but their main job is to write code)
> Python was written with people like scientists in mind.
Python had nothing to do with scientists when it started. It was written to be readable and easy to use and it started as a hobby project. It existed for over 15 years until the data science / ML ecosystem started growing around it.
- AstroDogCatcher 5y agoI'd flip that meme slightly; it is true that scientists write shitty code...but it turns out computer scientists do exactly the same, and with less humility.
- edgyquant 5y agoThe difference is programmers write shitty abstractions to abstract shitty code
- edgyquant 5y agoI should have been more clear, I didn’t mean python was written for scientists I meant it was designed with simpler syntax so people can pick it up and write a script in a few hours, scientists need to do some simple algorithm so they use python instead of fighting with a language with more terse syntax. People wrote their math libraries for python because it was a simple language (on the surface) with a C api. It was at the right place at the right time.