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by mcabbott
1505 days ago
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The struct's field name is `eta`, but this is an internal detail. Its constructor takes a positional-only argument, no public name. The greek letter is used in the documentation. And the reason is that every optimiser's documentation links to the original paper, and tries to follow that. If the Adam paper calls the two decay rates β1, β2, then staying close to that seems the least confusing option. |
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My most general point is that the identifiers we use in our code are almost never just convention or taste when we are sharing that code with anyone else (and for most, "anyone else" includes our future selves). Getting a little more specific, I'm specifically interested in Julia and look forward to working in it further, but I've personally felt pain around scientific/mathematical notation when trying to understand code I've found on github. tagrun dismissing my pain as nonsense and the people who argue for my ilk as perpetrators of bikesheddding is dipshitted. Yeah, I'm probably the asshole for being a college dropout trying to leverage modern scientific computing for my own ends (snoogins), but I'm also willing to bet tagrun is probably the member of a team that talks down to junior members and complains they haven't read enough papers or the right papers to see the magnificience of their code ;).
It's fine to write code that demands a domain expert to understand, but don't pretend like its good across all dimensions. There are tradeoffs involved.
Personally I find the preponderance of scientific/mathematical notation (whatever you want to call it) in Julia to be cute; It certainly does bind the code to linked papers in a pretty cool way when it all fits together properly. That said, its a pain in the ass when it doesn't fit together properly and I've personally had a journey into Julia spoiled due to frequency at which I had to figure out how to notate something or what word to use when regarding some squiggle I haven't encountered before. I look forward to having a better intuition for the greek alphabet but until then Julia will often be harder to read, let alone understand when compared to ruby or javascript or go or C# or any other of the roughly dozen programming languages I've worked with and feel comfortable translating between.