On Monday, April 14, 2014 6:15:26 PM UTC-7, Tony Kelman wrote:
>
> > At least in Python, trips in and out of ADOL-C almost count for nothing 
> as they're just passing pointers around.
>
> This might be the case in Julia as well. But I think you'll agree that 
> ADOL-C and friends are much more opaque and less hackable than Julia code.
>

Sure, they're opaque but I'm saying that they're opaque for a reason. AD is 
an entire field of research. As is optimization.
 

> > At least on OSX, both can be installed with brew with one command.
>
> Yep, Homebrew is pretty awesome, and Julia leverages that awesomeness 
> appropriately (Homebrew.jl). If you have a Mac. We don't all have Macs ;-)
>

There's Linuxbrew. On Windows you're out of luck, I guess but then you have 
worse concerns than brew ;)
 

>
> > And I don't mind dependencies if they provide state-of-the-art tools.
>
> Neither do I, but the flipside of this is segfaults and linker errors and 
> "oh great, Apple changed the C++ standard library," etc. etc. etc...
>

I agree but Julia is a moving target too. Understandably so, but a moving 
target still. Something consistently breaks when I upgrade the packages. As 
a newcomer I was following the tutorials on the YouTube channel, and some 
commands mentioned there are now deprecated.
 

>
> > We're probably coming from different angles. My goal is to assemble 
> numerical methods rather than to provide a modeling environment.
>
> Yes, probably. I've spent several years of my PhD trying to come up with 
> ways to do better than Ipopt, without a whole lot of success (probably 
> because I spend too much time getting distracted by the mailing lists of 
> open-source projects...). I've gotten much more traction in creating 
> modeling environments that make Ipopt easier to use by non-experts.
>

That's a bit what I was saying. Andreas spent his PhD years writing IPOPT, 
and then the next 10 years making it work really well and become the 
state-of-the-art solver that it is. I wouldn't dream of re-implementing it 
although I'm precisely in the same field of research. I do hack it here and 
there.

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