On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 4:18 PM Oscar Benjamin
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 15 Mar 2021 at 22:01, Aaron Meurer <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > As long as Theano itself still works in versions of Python that SymPy
> > supports, it would be better to deprecate the function rather than
> > just remove it. The function theano_code is public API so just
> > removing it would be a backwards compatibility break, which we try to
> > avoid without deprecations. See
> > https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/Deprecating-policy
>
> I think that if Theano itself is now unmaintained legacy software then
> it's fine to say that if someone wants to use it with sympy they
> should use an older version of sympy.
>
> > As an aside, one thing that has always annoyed me with Theano,
> > especially when SymPy imports it for its tests, is that Theano does a
> > lot of things at import time, such as running compilers to see if they
> > work and printing many warnings (see
> > https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/14747). I think it would be better
> > to do these things at runtime, e.g., after the first function is
> > called. I hope Aesara can improve this situation over Theano.
>
> This shows precisely that supporting something like Theano has a
> nonzero cost even if that support is "deprecated". When migrating our
> CI I had to work through many different projects that I do not know in
> order to keep the test suite ticking over. Each of those makes general
> project maintenance harder. I'm much happier about supporting a
> maintained project that has a future and has maintainers willing to
> help us provide support.

These are fair points. It sounds like we should definitely not leave
it as is. We should either deprecate it or remove it.

The existing pull request only does a name change, suggesting there
aren't very many differences between theano and aesara yet. So a
deprecation wouldn't be that hard. If that changes in the future, it
may be easier to just remove theanocode rather than trying to keep it
around.

>
> I'm interested to hear from anyone using SymPy with Theano though (if
> anyone on this particular mailing list is).

Same here. I also am interested in more background on the fork. Theano
itself was supposed to be "dead" a few years ago when the original
developers stopped working on it, but then the pymc developers picked
up maintenance. Could the same thing happen again?

Also, I had heard that pymc was dropping theano in favor of tensorflow
(do I remember this correctly?). Is this still planned, or has that
changed to be aesara now?

Aaron Meurer

>
>
> Oscar
>
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