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Why data scientists should start learning Swift

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Re: Why data scientists should start learning Swift

#11
Why would you use Swift as your new data science language when Julia was made for that purpose and Swift was not? Julia's data structures, functions, syntax and libraries were all designed with scientific computing in mind. Swift was designed for general purpose app development.

Re: Why data scientists should start learning Swift

#12

>engineers need a language that treats machine learning as a “first class citizen” Machine/Deep Learning are not some novel application, we've been multiplying matrices since forever.

Like with Fortran, APL, J/K, R and for at least a decade, Numpy.

Re: Why data scientists should start learning Swift

#14

Why would you use Swift as your new data science language when Julia was made for that purpose and Swift was not? Julia's data structures, functions, syntax and libraries were all designed with scientific computing in mind. Swift was designed for general purpose app development.

Heh, because 1-based arrays are gross. I'm poking fun of course, but you really shouldn't underestimate how many people are turned off of Julia by this.

Re: Why data scientists should start learning Swift

#15

Honestly I don't even use Swift for serious iOS apps, just for 'throwaway' apps for lack of a better word. Swift would need to stabilize for at least 5-10 years before I would consider building anything with Swift as the foundation. I strongly believe in backwards compatibility, the Swift team does not.

Yes and no... They did a ton if work to be backwards compatible with ObjC, while making breaking changes to Swift syntax/libraries with each new release. Although it is stabilizing.

Re: Why data scientists should start learning Swift

#18

Why would you use Swift as your new data science language when Julia was made for that purpose and Swift was not? Julia's data structures, functions, syntax and libraries were all designed with scientific computing in mind. Swift was designed for general purpose app development.

Heh, because 1-based arrays are gross. I'm poking fun of course, but you really shouldn't underestimate how many people are turned off of Julia by this.

It's not like it's the first. Doesn't Fortran default to 1-based? R and Matlab are also 1-based. Julia like those two are aimed at a mathematical domain, not zero-based offsets.

Anyway, it's not hard to get used to.

Re: Why data scientists should start learning Swift

#19
While the author says "Don’t mistake Swift for TensorFlow as a simple wrapper around TensorFlow to make it easier to use on iOS devices." , the only thing Python is missing from his wishlislist of features is "6. Native execution on mobile".

"7. Performance closer to C" is a non-issue - all the parts where performance matters are going to run on CUDA anyway and there's no performance hit there, and very little computing time is spent in the actual python code.

Re: Why data scientists should start learning Swift

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, because 1-based arrays are gross. I'm poking fun of course, but you really shouldn't underestimate how many people are turned off of Julia by this.

It's not like it's the first. Doesn't Fortran default to 1-based? R and Matlab are also 1-based. Julia like those two are aimed at a mathematical domain, not zero-based offsets. Anyway, it's not hard to get used to.

A bunch of wrongs don't make a right :-)

And honestly, it's because I do numerical programming that I value zero-based offsets. In addition to subscripting arrays (which I could do in any base), I use those subscripts in the math itself. For instance, the zeroth bin of an FFT indicates the zero frequency. I also choose the zeroth array element to represent the constant term (zeroth power) of a polynomial, and so on.

The common places where math notation uses 1-based subscripts (matrix notation) have more to do with people saying "first", "second", etc... With a few exceptions (the Hilbert matrix comes to mind), the base of the subscript isn't actually relevant to the math itself.

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