[Antik-devel] [lisp-stat] first draft of numerical lisp

[Tamas Papp]

On Sat, Oct 27 2012, Mirko Vukovic <mirko.vukovic at gmail.com> wrote:

> I put up my first draft of numerical lisp on
> https://github.com/mirkov/numerical-lisp
>
> You will have to clone it and look at the documentation in the
> doc/developers/index.html.
>
> Comments, feedback, participation welcome.

Hi Mirko,

I have never worked as part of a software development team and I have no
formal training in computer science, so I know very little about
designing libraries.

That said, I am somewhat skeptical about the idea of first specifying
development guidelines, then a detailed user interface, and leaving
coding after that.  IMO coding in CL is not that costly and is the only
way to test the viability of a design.  I fear that writing up
specifications before code would be wasted effort.

I don't see why you want to achieve everything ("numerical, statistical,
visualization, ...") in a single library.  That's great if you can pull
it off, but I find small, focused projects more manageable.  For
example, I would break up libraries like this:

- linear algebra
- numerical methods
- random variates
- visualization

(This pretty much follows the structure of the libraries I currently
have, so maybe I am biased).

Statistical code beyond simple sample statistics is a very ambitious
goal which requires a lot of domain-specific knowledge.  I think it is
more realistic to just provide the building blocks and let people write
their own statistical code.

Best,

Tamas