This is a mistake computing people of my (our?) age often made (make): determining for the user what is relevant for her. The only relevant response I can think of is: Why do you want these percentiles? Perhaps it appears she is helped better with mean value and standard deviation instead, perhaps not. If someone in the forum poses a problem, I'm not interested in relevance at all.
If correctness does not come first, I'm wondering what one is doing. R.E. Boss > -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- > Van: [email protected] [mailto:programming- > [email protected]] Namens Bo Jacoby > Verzonden: vrijdag 24 september 2010 8:38 > Aan: Programming forum > Onderwerp: Re: [Jprogramming] Classification problem > > First comes relevance, then correctness, performance, and elegance in some > order. Not every problem is put right. For example. Question: from a long > list of numbers, how to compute the 15th, 50th and 85th percentile? > Answer: Don't do that! Compute the mean value and the standard deviation > instead. > Venlig hilsen, Bo > > > --- Den tors 23/9/10 skrev Roger Hui <[email protected]>: > > Fra: Roger Hui <[email protected]> > Emne: Re: [Jprogramming] Classification problem > Til: "Programming forum" <[email protected]> > Dato: torsdag 23. september 2010 16.48 > > At first I was going to respond to R.E. Boss with a > cute and annoying reply, something like "first comes > elegance, then elegance, then elegance". But I think > now I agree with him, "first comes correctness, then > performance, then elegance", rather than "first comes > elegance and correctness". A counterexample to the > latter is a model for dyadic index-of for vectors. > An elegant and correct model is: > > ix=: #...@[ - (+/)@(+./\)@(=/) > > But due to abysmal performance this is pretty useless > in practice. > > I guess it depends on what you mean by "first comes". > If you were implementing dyadic index-of you _would_ > first writing something like the above, but almost > immediately you write something else. > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Robert Raschke <[email protected]> > Date: Thursday, September 23, 2010 6:57 > Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] Classification problem > To: Programming forum <[email protected]> > > > I disagree, first comes elegance and correctness, and these tend > > to go hand > > in hand if you are concentrating on elegance. I quite strongly > > believe a > > human reader is way more important than any machine. > > > > Robby > > > > On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 2:24 PM, R.E. Boss > > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > I agree. First comes correctness, then performance, then elegance. > > > > > > > > > R.E. Boss ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
