To me this sounds like a case for a fork: Hans doesn't yet feel confident about his Julia, but John wants to ditch maintainership. (Trust me John, I _really_ understand!) We need an organic way of "test-driving" a new maintainer. Hans, why don't you just fork it to your github account and start making changes, and let's see how it goes?
A couple of tips: - As you make changes, run the tests to see if they still pass, and you'll have some reason to hope that you may not have broken anything. - For any API changes, a way to be nice to users is to use the `@deprecate` macro. Adhering to those guidelines will make it easier for people to migrate to your package. If you get to the point of having something your proud of, rather than submitting a pull request to John's package, just advertise it to the list. That will begin the process of other people being able to test out your version, with no risk (John's will still be up, too). If all goes well, you'll eventually become the official maintainer. Hans, I already have a feature-request for you: spot checking particular elements of the gradient. When I have a function of 10^6 variables, often all I want to do it get some indication that I've done my analytic calculation of the gradient correctly. Computing all 10^6 components is horrifically slow, and usually not necessary. --Tim On Wednesday, January 22, 2014 08:28:05 AM John Myles White wrote: > Yes, it would. I just don’t know who’s going to do that. But I badly want > someone to. > > — John > > On Jan 22, 2014, at 3:33 AM, Hans W Borchers <[email protected]> wrote: > > John, as I understood you are overloaden. > > And I cannot believe this will change in spring. > > Wouldn't it be preferable if someone else takes over? > > > > Hans Werner > > > > > > On Wednesday, January 22, 2014 3:58:18 AM UTC+1, John Myles White wrote: > > If you’re willing to wait, I’m happy to return to the Calculus package in > > the spring. I’m focusing on DataFrames/DataArrays (and some database > > stuff that’s closely related) until then.> > > — John > > > > On Jan 21, 2014, at 8:42 AM, Hans W Borchers <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Thanks for these encouraging words. I have already written an R package > >> with more than a hundred numerical functions (incl. several numerical > >> derivatives), and I would be willing to help build up a numerical > >> package in Julia. But of course, someone from the Julia community will > >> be needed to take the lead. Please let me know when this 'management > >> position'(?) has been taken. > >> > >> On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 4:44:37 PM UTC+1, John Myles White wrote: > >> Just to chime in: the biggest problem with the Calculus isn’t the absence > >> of usable functionality, it’s that the published interface isn’t a very > >> good one and the more reliable interface, including things like > >> finite_difference_hessian, isn’t exported. > >> > >> To fix this, we need someone to come in and do some serious design work, > >> where they'll rethink interfaces and remove out-dated functionality. As > >> Tim Holy mentioned, the combination of the unpublished finite diference > >> methods and automatic differentation methods in DualNumbers should get > >> you very far.>> > >> — John
