[Numpy-discussion] Deprecation of financial routines

[Cera, Tim]

On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 2:37 AM, Juan Luis Cano <juanlu001 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As now master is open for 1.9, following the discussion opened here
>
> https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/2880
>
> it was suggested that we deprecate and eventually remove the financial
> functions in NumPy, because they pollute the main namespace and some are
> unimplemented. We could put them in a separate package, in case it
> doesn't exist yet. Nathaniel Smith and Ralf Gommers already gave +1, and
> Charles Harris suggested bringing this up in the mailing list.

When I was initially working with the docs it galled me to find
documented, but unimplemented financial functions.  I spent the time
to implement all of the unimplemented functions. As an example see
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/190.  I just glanced through the
code and all functions are there, implemented and documented, so I
don't know where that comment came from in
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/2880.  Definitely in 1.7.

About whether they should stay or go, I vote 0.  I see financial
functions as an absolute requirement in engineering (though often
engineers allow financial optimization and decisions to default to
others, IMO a big mistake).  Financial analysis in science?  Probably
not so much, which is my guess as to why the discussion was brought
up.

Since I wrote a couple of the financial functions, you would think I
might vote -1 to deprecation, but the reason I wrote the functions was
to remove the NotImplemented errors.  They really bothered me.  I
thought that if the functions were already included in numpy, they
must be useful to someone.  For me, typically I do any financial work
in a spreadsheet - that is why I vote 0.

Kindest regards,
Tim