[SciPy-Dev] SciPy-Dev Digest, Vol 128, Issue 5

[Sturla Molden]

Matt Newville <newville at cars.uchicago.edu> wrote:

> I don't disagree that scipy could use more pure optimizers, but I also
> think that striving for a more consistent and elegant interface to these
> would be very helpful.  With the notable exception of the relatively recent
> unification of the scaler minimizers with minimize(), it seems that many of
> the existing methods are fairly bare-bones wrappings of underlying C or
> Fortran code.   Of course, having such wrapping is critically important,
> but I think there is a need for a higher level interface as well.

The raison d'etre for SciPy is "nice to use". So clearly simple and
intuitive high-level interfaces are needed. If we only cared about speed we
should all be coding in Fortran 77. Personally I am willing to scrifice a
lot of speed for a nice high-level interface.

Currently my main interest in SciPy's LM is the underlying solver, though.
It's a very old Fortran code that even supplies its own linear algebra
solvers because it was written before LAPACK. It's not very nice on modern
computers, for various reasons.

Sturla