[SciPy-Dev] SciPy-Dev Digest, Vol 129, Issue 1

[Matt Newville]

> Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2014 00:05:43 +0000 (UTC)
> From: Sturla Molden <sturla.molden at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [SciPy-Dev] SciPy-Dev Digest, Vol 128, Issue 5
> To: scipy-dev at scipy.org
> Message-ID:
>         <1816260967425865047.889482sturla.molden-gmail.com at news.gmane.org>
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>
> 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.

The solvers in scipy.optimize use interfaces that are clearly inherited
directly from the Fortran, with very little change, even in the use of
short argument names.    In some ways it make it easy for old-timers who
see leastsq() as a shallow wrapping of MINPACKs lmdif/lmder.    It's "nice"
in that the objective function is written in Python,  But the interfaces to
these functions themselves is not very Pythonic.

> 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.

Could you elaborate? What you see as the main problems and the reasons that
this is not very nice on modern computers?

--Matt Newville
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