[burnished]

Everything being referenced is stuff you'd learn in a typical technical education as part of either calculus or statistics. Your reply comes off as of defensive in a way that implies that you're shocked some one would know any of this stuff.

[infogulch]

My reply stems from enriquto's misunderstanding of the purpose of the article, which is the "typical technical education" itself. It's like they are wondering why the article even exists, and isn't just a one line reference to the julia docs. Clearly there's nothing wrong with already having specific knowledge of a subject, but questioning the purpose of technical education because you already have it is bizarre.

Maybe an analogy would better explain my perspective. I imagine that enriquto would greatly appreciate my latest article, reproduced in its entirety below:

# Learn how to write a JSON parser

> j = JSON.parse("[1,2]")

Fin.

[enriquto]

Sorry for the misunderstanding, then. It was not at all my purpose to disparage this article. It is a lovely article and very clearly written and illustrated.

I'll state my point following your json parser example. If you write an article about the implementation of several json parsers, you may still want to call JSON.parse at the end, as a sanity check that your implementation is working. The function is right there and you may as well say that!

In the present case, since the author has already set-up explicitly Poisson equation as a linear system of equations, it would make sense to call julia's built-in solver. (If only to marvel that it is much, much faster than the simple methods shown before, thus it must make some really fancy stuff inside!)

[infogulch]

I agree with your point that it may be valuable to the reader to also mention common libraries or built-ins that solve the same problem that was discussed in the article somewhere near the end. More generally, linking to sources, docs, related work, or next steps can be very nice for readers to further their education. Framing your original comments with "the author should also mention... a standard solver like CHOLMOD" or "a standard solver like CHOLMOD ... as a sanity check that your implementation is working" as you described would have had a good chance of preventing our communication misfire and avoiding my (perhaps unnecessarily strong) snark.

[alisonkisk]

It's your job to control your snark, not anyone else's job.

[alisonkisk]

Please stop attacking other commenters. instead of attacking (the same person, twice!), try to understand what is being said, or ask questions.

[cpp_frog]

Numerical solutions of PDE are hardly studied in a typical technical education in calculus (it requires more theoretical machinery) or statistics (PDEs in statistics is somewhat narrow and specialized).