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by gmueckl 1944 days ago
How do you keep a codebase simple when you need have things in it like implementations of state of the art algorithms to compare against and the previous iterations of your own method so that you can test whether you're actually improving? Then, depending on what you're doing, there's also all the extra nontrivial code for tests and sanity checks of all these implementations.

Simplicity is a nice dream. The realities of research are very often stacked against it.
2 comments
j-pb 1944 days ago
How the heck to you hope to gain any insighfull metrics when you've got a cobbled together mess that you only half understand. For what it's worth you might only be benchmarking random code layout fluctuations.

I've seen research groups drown in their legacy code base.

The issue of juggling too many balls you describe is one you only have to begin with because the state of the art implementations are so shoddy to begin with.

Research suffers as much as everybody else from feature creep. Good experiments keep the number of new variables low.

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gmueckl 1944 days ago
Research code is not only written to measure runtime. Reducing the argument to only that aspect is not helping the discussion.

And you say it yourself: good experiments change a single variable at a time. So how do you check that a series of potential improvements that you are making is sound?

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childintime 1944 days ago
It seems Julia has the answer: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/the-unreasonable-eff...
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gmueckl 1944 days ago
I can't quite follow what the article is trying to describe because of the heavy use of analogies.

A Google search makes it look like Julia has a mechanism where you can extent the sets of overloads of a function or method outside the original module. The terminology is different (functions have methods instead of overloads in their speak). I don't see how that feature solves the problem in practice.

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cdsousa 1943 days ago
Julia multiple dispatch allows dynamic polymorphism.

Check https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1801216/what-is-the-diff... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc9HwsxE1OY

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